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UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI
May 12, 2005
Date:___________________
Morgan J. McFarland
I, _________________________________________________________,
hereby submit this work as part of the requirements for the degree of:
Doctorate of Philosophy (Ph.D.)
in:
Department of History, College of Arts and Sciences
It is entitled:
The Watery World: The Country of the Illinois, 1699-1778
This work and its defense approved by:
Dr. Geoffrey Plank, Chair
Chair: _______________________________
Dr. John Mack Faragher
_______________________________
Dr. David Stradling
_______________________________
Dr. Willard Sunderland
_______________________________
_______________________________
THE WATERY WORLD: THE COUNTRY OF THE ILLINOIS, 1699 – 1778
A dissertation submitted to the
Division of Research and Advanced Studies
of the University of Cincinnati
in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of
DOCTORATE OF PHILOSOPHY (Ph.D.)
in the Department of History
of the College of Arts and Sciences
2005
By
Morgan J. McFarland
B.A., University of Alaska, 1977
MFA, University of Alaska, 1981
M.A., University of Cincinnati, 2001
Committee Chair: Dr. Geoffrey Plank
Abstract
The Watery World, an environmental study, challenges traditional histories of Illinois that
present the natural environment in 1778 as untouched, virgin land. Occupied by the French
since 1699, Illinois lands had been depleted of furbearing animals, deforested, and rigorously
hunted. An exodus of French and Illinois Indians after 1763 encouraged a partial recovery of
the environment; yet there were permanent losses, such as oak-hickory savannas and bison.
Changes in the tri-partite habitat of French Illinois – floodplain, talus and bluffs, and upland
till plain – also contributed to an escalation of inter-tribal conflicts. Northern Fox, Sauk,
Potawatomi, and Sioux, as well as eastern bands of Miami and the Missouri Osage, competed
for the resources of the Illinois prairies. The radical depopulation of Illinois tribes over the
eighteenth century has been studied in the context of European contact, yet change to the
natural environment has not been emphasized. This study argues that environmental
degradation played a role in the decline of the Illinois subtribes and was also a factor in
European occupation. The experience of the British particularly, who arrived to claim
Illinois after the Treaty of Paris in 1763, was impacted by soil exhaustion, flooding and
resultant fevers, the exodus of peoples, and deforestation. The massive influx of American
settlers after 1778, when George Rogers Clark captured British Illinois, rapidly led to new
environmental controls and surveys. The watery world of the Illinois Country saw an even
more significant period of ditching, drainage, and aggressive agriculture. Illinois Indian
lands were alienated; fencing laws replaced old French communal codes; and enormous
grants of land were made along the rivers. The effect on the ecology of the Illinois Country
was profound. This study examines the role of water in the settlements and livelihoods of
Illinois Indians, French, British, and at the very end, Americans. It invokes the rich riverine,
aquatic environment of the mid Mississippi River basin in the eighteenth century and
documents its changes as important historical determinants.
Acknowledgments
The research for this dissertation was made smoother and much less onerous because of
the committed help of the following people: Valerie Berry of the Lewis Library, Vincennes
University; James Cornelius and John Hoffman of the Illinois Historical Survey, University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne; Tom Foti, State Ecologist and Chief of Research, Arkansas
Natural Heritage Commission; Dr. Tracy Leavelle, Creighton University; John White,
Ecologist and Nature Conservationist, Ecological Services, Urbana-Champagne; Dr. William
I. Woods, Contract Archaeology, Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville; and the
Interlibrary Loan staff at the following libraries: Indiana University, Bloomington; Monroe
County Public Library, Bloomington; and Kansas State University, Manhattan, Kansas. I am
also grateful to archivists at the Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis, Missouri; the Filson
Society, Louisville, Kentucky; the Lily Library, Indiana University, Bloomington; the Glenn
R. Black Laboratory of Archaeology, Bloomington; and the Newberry Library, Chicago.
In a separate category altogether is the contribution of Mr. Monty R. Baker, retired
bibliographic librarian, University of Illinois. Mr. Baker worked tirelessly for over a year on
his own time and often, at his own expense, to track down and procure hard to find source
materials. His efforts allowed the completion of this study in probably half the time it would
have taken otherwise. Mr. Baker contacted booksellers, librarians, and dealers in places as
diverse as Edinburgh, Scotland, New Orleans, Ann Arbor, Michigan, Maine, and Quebec. He
obtained editions and rare prints of journals, logs, and records. In addition, Mr. Baker read
and reviewed many sections of this dissertation and suggested additional supporting
materials (and often, found them). He has been a collaborator in many senses of the word.
I also thank Dr. David Stradling for important help in strengthening the ecological
arguments; Dr. Willard Sunderland and Dr. John Mack Faragher for reading and useful
commentary on a draft; Daryl Shadrick for many, many hours of listening, encouragement,
and technical support; J. Kinsey Parkhe for being a willing audience for my speculations and
stories; my husband, Tom Morgan, for scientific contributions to insect, buffalo, and plant
ecology, as well as significant emotional strength; and my daughters Lila Walsh, Shelley,
Kristina, and Adelle McFarland for living with much change and accepting it cheerfully.
Most of all I sincerely thank Dr. Geoffrey Plank, director of my research, for the hours he
spent reading and commenting on drafts. His enthusiasm for my ideas and his careful, timely
and detailed suggestions have helped me time and again to think my way through a
complicated story.
1
Table of Contents
Introduction................................................................................................................................2
Chapter One: The Watery World: Illinois Country Ecology ................................................25
Chapter Two: Patterns of Settlement, Cahokia, 1699 – 1733.................................................48
Chapter Three: Patterns of Settlement, Chartres, 1720 – 1752...............................................91
Chapter Four: The Trade Matrix at Fort Chartres.................................................................123
Chapter Five: French and Indian Counterpoint: 1751 - 1752 ..............................................159
Chapter Six: The British in the Illinois Before 1770 ............................................................177
Chapter Seven: Across the River: The Missouri Lands, 1765 – 1775..................................217
Chapter Eight: Land of Rumor: British, French, and Indian Illinois, 1765 – 1778 .............247
Epilogue .................................................................................................................................286
Bibliography ..........................................................................................................................296
2
Introduction
The Watery World is an environmental history of a small, fertile niche along a great river.
The French colonial settlements of southern Illinois lay right at an imaginary hinge point:
here the Mississippi bows slightly to the west below the Big Rivers confluence of the Illinois
and Missouri. Flooded and replenished for thousands of years, the black, fecund earth along
a sixty mile stretch of floodplain became a theater for the historic meetings of many peoples.
Each group who migrated and farmed there – middle and late Mississippian Indians, historic
Illinois Indians, the French, the British, and finally, the Americans – changed and were
changed themselves by proximal relations of riverine earth and water. This study is anchored
right in the fertile mud of that insular ecosystem. Between 1699 and 1778, a peculiar,
localized history evolved. The Europeans who arrived there were representatives of
continental and international events and policies; their very coming – their deposition on the
eastern shores of the Mississippi through ventures in exploration and trade – brought the
“outside” into the Illinois. Yet inside the Illinois Country already lay a mobile, interactive
world of diverse indigenous peoples. They were responding to distant events and catalysts
within a wideflung kinship and alliance system of their own. In truth, there never was, or
only once was, very long ago in distant geologic time, a primeval, virgin Illinois. The power
of European narratives, of European languages, the passionate evocation of the beauty of the
Illinois, has created an enduring fable: pristine wilderness. In the “untouched” Illinois
nestled an extraordinary, virile flora and fauna, a panoramic abundance often catalogued by
first time observers from floating river craft.
3
Yet even this view has become further textured over the centuries. As the fable goes, the
Indian tribes who lived in the Illinois Country did not perceive its potential and cared little
about its yield until the French arrived in 1699 to instruct them.1 The French alone among
Europeans understood the country and inhabitants along the great river. They brought Old
World peasant folkways and developed (primarily) illiterate, jovial relations with Indians that
included much intermarriage, human contact, communication, and trade. Yet the French
maintained a pronounced geographic isolation. Scant population growth and erratic influx of
French settlers bespoke a failure to develop the rich Illinois lands. In 1765, following the
cession of the Illinois after the Seven Years War, the British arrived. They came as political
machinators and commercial marketers and stirred up trouble, disrupting the French-Indian
allegiances and prosperous – if desultory – trade-agricultural world. Focused on political and
economic control, heavy-handed with French and Indians alike, and unprepared for distant
frontier living, the British over ten years spurred an emptying-out of the Illinois. The French
migrated to the Missouri lands while the Illinois Indians shrank away to impoverished
remnants. Once more, a group of incoming people failed to correctly perceive or utilize the
resources of the Illinois. Into the vacuum created by the British evacuation in 1775 – into a
waiting land – poured American settlers. Finally the wild prairie and forest mosaic of the
Illinois came of age. The right people had tenure.
A progression of local and regional histories of these diverse peoples has produced this
narrative. In 2001, for instance, the state of Illinois reprinted a commissioned 1978 study by
Richard Jensen, Illinois: A History. Jensen states that the French left no more impact on the
land than place names. The fable of slight human impact before American settlement is
1
For a fuller discussion of historical myth-making surrounding Indians and their relationship to the
environment, see Shepard Krech, Ecological Indian: myth and history (1999).
4
enduring. This study seeks to take that fable apart, to discover and analyze exactly how
prehistoric and historic Indians, French, and British peoples found ways to live on a sixtymile stretch of water-dominated land. Their “failures” are construed here along two axes:
what happened to their numbers, and why – the ebb and flow of population – and how did
their ways of using natural resources contribute to those changes? In the last twenty years,
other fine historical studies have begun to examine these questions. In particular, the work of
Carl J. Ekberg and a host of archeologists, stimulated by the pioneering work of Margaret
Kimball Brown in the 1980’s, have focused right on the French and Indian settlements.
Ekberg has studied French colonial St. Genevieve across the Mississippi River as well as the
agricultural practices of the French on the eastern shores. Archeologists have striven to
determine locations of early Illinois Indian hunting camps and villages.2 Central questions
involve the degree of contact between the Illinois tribes and the early French, the impact of
European trade goods, and patterns of Indian movement. The dramatic drop in Illinois Indian
population over the eighteenth century has attracted the interest of population geographers
and anthropologists. In 1956, Emily Blasingham published “The Depopulation of the Illinois
Indians,” a two-part study of variables that may have impacted the precipitous decline of the
2
See the work of Carl J. Ekberg, Colonial Ste. Genevieve: An Adventure on the Mississippi Frontier (1985);
French Roots in the Illinois Country: The Mississippi Frontier in Colonial Times (2000); and Francois Valle
and his world: Upper Louisiana before Louis and Clark (2002). Margaret Kimball Brown’s important 1979
dissertation, Cultural Transformations Among the Illinois: An Application of a Systems Model, has been
published by Michigan State University, and she has subsequently, with Lawrie Cena Dean, collated, translated,
and published a critical collection of French notarial records from the first half of the eighteenth century. See
The Village of Chartres in Colonial Illinois 1720 - 1765 (1977); see also Brown and Dean as co-authors of The
French Colony in the mid-Mississippi Valley (1995). In addition to Brown’s study of change and acculturation
among the Illinois Indians, two other collections of archaeological work are particularly important: Calumet &
Fleur-de-Lys: Archaeology of Indian and French Contact in the Midcontinent, edited by John A. Walthall and
Thomas E. Emerson (1992), and French Colonial Archaeology: The Illinois Country and the Western Great
Lakes, edited by John A. Walthall (1991). See also Charles J. Bareis and James M. Porter, American Bottom
Archaeology: A summary of the FAI-270 Project Contribution to the Culture History of the Mississippi River
Valley (1984).
5
Illinois at mid-century.3 Almost forty years later, Joseph Zitomersky’s dense study of
Indian-European demographics in French Illinois appeared, French Americans-Native
Americans in Eighteenth-Century French Colonial Louisiana: The Population Geography of
the Illinois Indians, 1670s-1760s (1994). These works provide the first important attempts at
reconstructing a fragmented, often poorly-documented story of decimation and eradication in
a complex frontier habitat.
Each history in its own way selects a specific group to follow, and while some
interactions of groups are explored, these studies remain curiously incomplete: they take at
face value the accounts of the Illinois land. The environment is treated as a backdrop for the
stories of the people. Carl Ekberg does the best job of addressing differences in settlement
and agriculture in each of the French villages along the Mississippi, pointing out the more
saturate, watery lands of the Cahokia area to the north and highlighting the wheat-growing
successes of Kaskaskia to the south. Yet in Ekberg’s careful analysis of French agricultural
practices, the Illinois Indians have a limited role. They remain for the most part domiciled in
their villages near the French communal lands. A similar restriction occurs in the best
studies of the Illinois Indians themselves, Wayne C. Temple’s Indian Villages of the Illinois
Country: Historic Tribes (1958) and two very different sources, Raymond Hauser’s 1973
dissertation, “The Ethnohistory of the Illinois Indian Tribe, 1673 –1832,” and Joseph
Jablow’s descriptive study of Indian movement and habitation, Indians of Illinois and
Indiana: Illinois, Kickapoo, and Potawatomi Indians (1974). These superlative early works
still fail to recreate the ways that Illinois Indians were daily involved with the French and the
British, the ways that all those peoples were using the land and resources of the Illinois
3
See Emily J. Blasingham, “The Depopulation of the Illinois Indians, Part I,” Ethnohistory, Vol. 3(3) Summer,
1956, and Part II, Ethnohistory, Vol. 3 (4), Autumn, 1956.
6
Country. The reason for this elision has to do with the persistence of the American success
story narrative: the breaking of the prairies, the tapping of the dramatic agricultural potential
of the American Bottom. The GLO (Government Land Office) surveyor has appeared in the
record as almost a kind of folk hero; it is in the early years of the nineteenth century that the
story begins to be told about human interaction with the Illinois land itself.
This study argues that important environmental changes in the Illinois Country were
engendered not only by the Americans but also by the French and their relationship to both
the riverine land and the Indians; and that the Illinois Indians in their particularized locale
were caught in a matrix of forces based on resource competition among a variety of peoples.
To reconstruct the eighteenth century environment, an inter-disciplinary approach has been
used, culling longitudinal studies in botany, ecology, geology, and soil science. The crossdisciplinary fields of ethnohistory, anthropology, and archaeology have been critically
important in reconstructing changes in the lives of Indians, French, and British. Another
approach has been to make much more extensive use of French notarial records that contain
invaluable property descriptions. These legal documents offer clues to how land was used but
also, how it was perceived. To this point, historians have used the notarial documents to learn
about inheritance practices and French material culture through estate listings. These records
can also map out the floodplain settlements and establish patterns and changes.
The history of the Illinois land and the history of the Illinois Indians are inextricable from
each other. Therefore, this study has two purposes. First, it retells the history of European
occupation of what would become the American Bottom in terms of human relationships to
and effect on land. The saturated, often-flooded plain to which the French came to begin
farming shaped specific kinds of trade and settlement history. At the village of Chartres and
7
Fort Chartres, previously-farmed Indian plots lying in scattered profusion over the
bottomlands, as well as continual access to water routes, created a burgeoning agricultural
and trade center. Farther north, at Cahokia, despite a one hundred square mile grant, French
agriculture failed to develop; the land was marshy and full of seeps. Over the course of the
eighteenth century, French and Indians changed the sixty mile riverine world that had
previously known intermittent and migratory occupations (save the long-lived prehistoric
Indian city at Cahokia). How a shared European-Indian history altered the environment is a
corollary theme to the French settlement studies and leads to a different interpretation of the
1760’s and 1770’s in the Illinois Country.
A second purpose is to tease out the role of the Illinois Indians in each of the two case
studies of French settlement and to continue to tell the story of these Indians across the
eighteenth century. While there is little information to reconstruct the ways Indian
perception and use of land changed, histories to date have concentrated on Indian movements
and the archaeology of village sites. There has been little analysis of relationships among
Illinois subtribes and also between the Illinois and other Indian nations historically occupying
the area, especially the Miami, Potawatomi, and Osage. Close re-examination of French and
British accounts can highlight survival strategies of the Illinois in a significantly changed
natural environment. The Illinois Country sequesters a history of two broad human cultures
intersecting in a powerful riverine habitat. Likewise, the Mississippi floodplain supporting
five French and three Indian villages across eighty years was immediately affected by the
ways these populations met each other. Yet most of this interaction can be characterized as a
culture of opportunism that left no enduring records. This is also true for the land itself. The
fecund nature of the floodplain allowed for rapid successional growth and return to some
8
presettlement characteristics once large numbers of people left the Illinois Country, as
happened in the 1760’s. When the Americans surveyed the land in the early 1800’s, they
described traces of both permanent change engendered by French and Indian occupation –
and a natural recovery process.
The story here opens in 1699, when French Seminarian missionaries from Quebec
established the Holy Family Mission at Cahokia. French religious had been living and
working among the Kaskaskia Indians at Starved Rock, near Peoria, prior to 1699. In truth,
since the early contact years of the 1670’s, there had been a consistent outreach to the Illinois
Country, a southward thrust that included the mission in Chicago. This study begins,
however, with the French and Indians in the Cahokia area, a distinctive, watery ecosystem
home to millions of waterfowl that had long relied on the Mississippi River. This riverine
section of the Illinois Country was so saturated that it was described by eighteenth-century
observers as “glinting with hundreds of tiny mirrors.”4 Eight chapters describe the intricate
patterns of French-Indian-British experience with each other and with the plants, animals,
water and land of the Illinois. As such, The Watery World is a localized history, replete with
small human dramas, with recreated visual pictures of the eighteenth century environment,
and with narratives of life: of ascending trumpeter swans, of raspy cord grasses taller than a
rider on horseback, of green-headed flies driving buffalo north, of French ponies trained to
swim. It is above all a study of mobility, not only the ebb and flow of peoples in and out of
the Illinois, but the ebb and flow of the Mississippi River and its tributaries. As such, it
4
See also “The Journal of Lieutenant Eddington, or the Surgeon,” in the autumn of 1765; Eddington mentions
“the millions of waterfowl” in “the little Lakes and Marshes everywhere that water is to be found.” See this
journal in Broadswords and Bayonets: The Journals of the Expedition Under the Command of Captain Thomas
Stirling, edited by Robert G. Carroon (The Society of Colonial Wars in Illinois, 1984), p. 94.
9
embraces an irony: for the Illinois Country, perhaps alone in the geography of the Old
Northwest, did not experience endemic Indian-white violence nor did the generous prairies
ever support a flotsam-jetsam Indian population, recombining, resettling, then fragmenting
and moving elsewhere (French-Fox Indian hostilities do characterize the area until 1732 and
intermittently, beyond, but there were no massacres of the Illinois French).
Before Marquette and Joliet sailed down the Mississippi into the Illinois Country in 1673,
the land between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi, identified by Richard
White as “le pays d’en haut,” was characterized by daily migration of peoples. In the Ohio
Valley, refugee camps of relocated Indians began to dot maps by the beginning of the
eighteenth century. Responding to continental forces, trade and war pressures from the north
and east, a variety of peoples, both European and Indian, were on the move. From the east
into the Ohio Valley and all along the northern Great Lakes corridors, relocation and reestablishment characterized the years before the French penetrated into the Illinois and for
many years after as well. Reading any of the primary sources available for French or British,
for example, one is struck by just how quickly an outpost could be established, or, as
historical geographers put it, implanted. The French Fort Crevecoeur, for instance, erected in
1680 “on a low hill between two ravines on the Illinois River near the present site of Peoria,”
was built and then destroyed by La Salle within a short period of time. Up went the double
palisade of logs “enclosing two cabins,” and a fort emerged from the rich oak savanna along
the river.5 Similarly, Indian groups could load entire villages and haul them via dogs and
travois, and later, with horses, relocating to new areas when their hunting grounds were
exhausted or invaded, or when they became angry with European policies. The Miami
5
Betty I. Madden, Art, Crafts, and Architecture in Early Illinois (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974), p.
17.
10
Indians’ permanent relocation from the Detroit area down into the Wabash River lands of
Indiana in the 1740’s is a good example of such a change.
In The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region,
1650 -1815 (1991), Richard White describes the devastating effect of Iroquoian violence on a
host of lesser and greater tribes with a haunting image: “Like a knife scouring a pane of
glass, warfare apparently far more brutal than any known previously among these peoples
etched the first fine dangerous lines across the region in the 1640s.” In addition to epidemics
of disease, the Iroquois attacks had “fallen like hammer blows across the length and breadth
of the lands bordering the Great Lakes....”6 Under pressure from these attacks, and also in
response to competition for game and furs, the Shawnee and Delaware Indians were moving
into the Ohio Valley. From the Great Lakes area, bands of northern Fox, Sauk, Potawatomi,
Winnebago, and Ojibway were periodically raiding south into the Illinois lands. The names
of these tribes show up so frequently in French dispatches that it becomes easy to think of
them as perpetual, hardened adversaries. Sensitive studies of both the Fox and the
Potawatomi by R. David Edmunds reveal a different tale.7 The Fox, termed by the French
the Renards or Outagamies, and self-designated the Mesquakie, “people of the red earth,”
shared many cultural similarities with the Illinois Indians. Like the Illinois, they were trapped
geographically between the push of Europeans from the east and the formidable Sioux tribes
to the west. The Fox had been driven into east-central Wisconsin not by the Iroquois but by
the Ojibway; in their new homeland, they lived at the extreme terminus of the flow of French
trade goods. Protection of their food and fur supplies in the narrow Wisconsin portage
6
Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650 –1815
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 1.
7
See R. David Edmunds and Joseph L. Peyser, The Fox Wars: The Mesquakie Challenge to New France
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993); see also Edmunds, The Potawatomi, Keepers of the Fire
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1978).
11
corridor – beginning to be crossed and recrossed by laden French trade canoes seeking
markets with the Illinois, the Missouri tribes, and the Sioux – engendered fifty years of what
became known as The Fox Wars. The Illinois Indians’ hunting trips north onto the prairies
where buffalo herds migrated also placed them in competition with the Fox. While one
reference alone states that Fox-Illinois hostility stemmed from the Fox belief that Illinois
Indians were killing female beaver, forbidden within the Fox cosmology, it is far more likely
that these tribes were being squeezed inside an increasingly small geographic area.
The Teton Sioux at this time were also in transition. In the late seventeenth and early
eighteenth centuries, they were moving constantly on foot (even in 1812 the French trader
Antoine Tabeau would characterize them as “always wandering” and “the wandering
nations.”) Teton and Yanktonai Sioux appeared “on the edges of the Great Plains” by 1800.8
Beginning to obtain horses from the Trans-Mississippi Arikara tribe, the Sioux moved
steadily westward toward the Black Hills. Their progress was intermittent and punctuated
with violent defensive raids to keep other tribes from hunting and trapping in the rich fur
lands of the northern Mississippi River Valley. Even the French eventually feared to
encounter Sioux in the northern wilderness. French voyageurs and coureur du bois
discovered that they could use the Saskatchewan River, a northern trade route, to bypass the
volatile Sioux country.9
Sioux and Fox-Sauk allied raids on the Illinois nation began to be commonplace by the
second half of the seventeenth century, and one historian, Eric Hinderaker, calls the Illinois
8
See Richard White’s analysis of the importance of Sioux migration in “The Winning of the West: the
Expansion of the Sioux in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” Journal of American History, Vol. 65 (2)
(Sept., 1978).
9
W.J. Eccles, The Canadian Frontier 1534 – 1760 (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1969), p. 149.
12
at the time of French contact a “beleaguered people.”10 It is true that when Marquette and
Joliet met the first Illinois Indians, a band of re-located Peoria living in present-day Iowa,
those Indians were in retreat from the Iroquois. Other phrases Hinderaker employs to
describe the Illinois Indians include “fractured social world,” “disintegrating confederacies,”
and “bewildering array of peoples.” He feels similarly about the French in the Illinois:
“French colonists had indeed already settled in the Illinois country, but the communities they
helped to create were disorderly, and the alliances they forged were unreliable and
unpredictable.”11 While both Richard White and Hinderaker have provided invaluable
studies of Indian mobility and allegiances, setting those patterns within the framework of
international empire jockeying, one must ask the question, “unreliable and unpredictable
compared to what?” There had never been a community of intermingled European-Indian
population that endured with stability, reliability, and predictability on the North American
continent (possible contenders are the French Acadian-Mi’kmaq Indian relationship and joint
tenure in Nova Scotia, and the French-Illinois Indian communities along the Mississippi).
Hinderaker’s study of the Illinois Country makes the same statements about its value as
almost all other political and empire studies previously:
If France controlled the Illinois Country, it gained a strong, unified American empire;
if not, it was left with two small colonies (one oppressively hot, the other unbearably
cold) separated by a thousand miles of potentially hostile terrain. In addition to its
strategic importance, the Illinois country was also singularly attractive as a center
of settlement.12
The “strategic importance” of the Illinois Country was at first largely cartographic. During
the negotiations that produced the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, concluding the lengthy and
10
Eric Hinderaker, Elusive Empires: Constructing Colonialism in the Ohio Valley, 1673 – 1800 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 13.
11
Hinderaker, p. 92.
12
Ibid.
13
costly War of the Spanish Succession, a series of what French Canadian historian Dale
Miquelon calls “horse-trading” deals emerged. France ceded to England Newfoundland, the
Hudson’s Bay area, and Acadia, using the imprecise phrasing, “with its ancient boundaries.”
As French Acadia was transferred to Britain and French treaty-makers concentrated on
maritime holdings that would preserve their fishing rights, Miquelon points out that inland
territorial claims “received scant attention.” Using a plethora of inaccurate maps, whose
“flat, creamy surfaces” and “beckoning spaces” allowed the formation of “notional
boundaries,” treaty makers carved up the North American continent. During the Utrecht
negotiations, for instance, the British tried to project their sovereignty straight across the map
to the Mississippi River. Maps created the illusion of vast, empty territory. In turn, the
French way of perceiving empire was “an abstraction, a construction based on theory,
dispatches, books, and maps....”13 Of key importance in the Treaty of Utrecht was a clause
that allowed both French and British equal commercial privileges with the “far Indians,” and
France had to recognize the British-Iroquois trade covenant.14 This concession would prove
to be the catalyst to the slowly-building, slowly-brewing Seven Years War that would erupt
in the Ohio Valley in 1754 - 1755. “Equal commercial privileges” encouraged a strenuous,
increasingly desperate – and often vile – competition for Indian trade. The two ancient rivals
of France and England used time-honored tactics to gain control of the western fur trade.
France garrisoned the rivers with outposts while Britain sent in packtrain traders overland.
Yet as historian William Eccles has pointed out, the threat posed to the French North
American empire in the commercial privileges concession “did not become real” for nearly
13
See Dale Miquelon, “Envisioning the French Empire: Utrecht, 1711-1713,” French Historical Studies Vol.
24 (4) (Autumn 2001), pp. 653 – 677.
14
W.J. Eccles, The Canadian Frontier, p. 141.
14
forty years.15 The Long Peace in the Ohio Valley proceeding the outbreak of the Seven
Years War resulted from the behavior of the British toward the western Indian tribes. For a
long time, British preferred to concentrate on the illegal fur trade in the Oswego-Albany
arena of New York.16 Out in the distant Illinois, the French and Indians were left alone to
work out their own ways of living in a diverse ecosystem that received only one shipment a
year of trade goods, via the return French convoy from New Orleans.
Although The Watery World is set within the ambit of international rivalries and trade
wars, and although the French and British military personnel in the Illinois Country wrote
many letters revealing an astute awareness of those conflicts, the policies with which the
country was governed seemed to have little direct effect upon the lives of most people there.
They went on hunting, farming, tanning skins, sending produce convoys to New Orleans,
manufacturing bear oil, shipping furs and peltries north to Montreal, gathering walnuts and
pecans, chopping down white oak and mulberry, then red cedar, building river craft, and
trading horses. The French and the four Illinois Indian subtribes – the Peoria, CahokiaTamaroa, Mechigamea, and Kaskaskia – lived in relative isolation. When the area was
invaded, for warfare remained endemic between the Illinois and the Fox, Sauk, Potawatomi
and Sioux, the peoples who were invaded or attacked did not leave. At times various Illinois
tribes went to live across the Mississippi or south, with the Arkansas Quawpaw; but they
always returned. To the east, the Grand Prairie of Illinois rolled away, a 151 mile expanse of
tall, often virulently hot and abrasive grasses thick with flies and mosquitoes, dotted only
here and there with oak-hickory groves. In that prairie-woodland mosaic no refugee Indian
15
W. J. Eccles, France in America (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1972), p. 109.
For a key analysis of this illegal trade and its impact on the French-British international struggle, see Jean
Lunn, “The Illegal Fur Trade Out of New France, 1713 –1760,” Canadian Historical Association Annual
Report, 1939.
16
15
villages grew up, despite frequent descriptions by Europeans of the vast game reserves there.
The “republics” of refugee Indian nations, coalescing in the Ohio Valley as tribal remnants
and dislocations engendered a sustained wandering – these republics did not form on the
prairies.17
The waterways of the mid Mississippi Valley conducted French and Indians alike north to
the trading posts of Michilimackinac, Green Bay, and Detroit, or south to New Orleans. From
time to time Chickasaw Indians from the south attempted to invade the Illinois, hostile to the
French, who competed in their deerskin trade with the British in the southern territories. Yet
no permanent changes in the French or Indian settlements seem to have occurred, with the
single exception of a 1752 catastrophic raid on the Illinois villages. The 180-canoe flotilla
that descended the Mississippi to wipe out the Mechigamia settlement near Fort Chartres
held a combined force of Fox, Potawatomi, and Sioux, determined to avenge a series of raids
the Illinois had made on Fox and Sioux hunters. The Illinois Indian loss of life in this raid
was never redeemed. As such, this attack stands out across the entire eighteenth century as
the most violent episode in the French settlement history in the middle Mississippi Valley.
Despite these casualities and the persistently low numbers of French settlers, the people
who came to the Illinois by and large stayed there. Such is the character of the Illinois that
even after the Jesuits were expelled in 1763, at least one priest found it impossible to stay
away. Father Meurin, aging yet passionate, returned and begged to be allowed to minister to
his French and Indian parishioners. He was permitted to stay only if he became a Capuchin
priest. He did so, continuing to live near the Mississippi River, crossing and recrossing it
until his death. The Illinois Indian tribes who greeted the incoming French missionaries at the
17
See Richard White’s discussion of Indian “republicanism” and “republics” in Chapter Five, “Republicans and
Rebels,” in The Middle Ground.
16
turn of the century in 1700 were still living along the sixty-mile riverine strip when the
Americans arrived in 1778. Their numbers were greatly reduced, but they were there.
Similarly, although large numbers of French did migrate to Spanish “Luisiana” across the
Mississippi, taking with them their slaves and their devotion to Catholicism, many early
sources attest that it was the wealthier people who left. The poorer French, the hunting and
trapping population, as well as tradesmen and entrepreneurs, stayed on. Cahokia especially
became an almost entirely French village in the last decades of the eighteenth century.
Finally, even soldiers who entered the Illinois under the command of George Rogers Clark in
1778 returned to purchase title to land and farm. The persistence of these peoples tells a story
of love for a particular land, one virtually unexpressed in extant documents.
While the insular Illinois Country endured – the farthest, the most distant outpost of the
French empire and then of the British – and while the peoples there had to adjust to political
regime changes, the land they depended on was also changing. Against the backdrop of a
larger international drama, the competition between France and England for control of Indian
trade, the Illinois Country between Cahokia and Kaskaskia was depleted of fur-bearing
mammals, especially deer, and in large part deforested. Channel changes and flooding of the
Mississippi River ruined agricultural fields and undermined the limestone walls of Fort
Chartres. The Watery World describes how human history in the area was affected by these
forces, including both imperial and small, local Indian histories. Chapters Two and Three
present individual case studies of French settlement patterns, the first at Cahokia and the
second in the Fort Chartres area. Differences in the earth itself – moisture level especially –
resulted in two different trajectories of trade and agriculture, which in turn affected
European-Indian relationships. Chapter Three especially examines land use patterns among
17
the proto-historic and historic Indian tribes, addressing the long-held and pernicious belief
that French settlers arrived into virgin land and that their agricultural successes were due to
alluvial fertility. Chapter Four describes the evolution of the trade matrix at Fort Chartres
and the way the Mechigamea Indians living near the fort became key players in the
provisioning trade. That role provided them with a way to survive the changes in larger
European trade practices, in which their own early role as middlemen was eliminated. As
Eric Hinderaker has pointed out, the system of rivers in the Ohio Valley and its western
Illinois terminus created new trade and commercial relationships, the means by which a
temporary resurrection of autonomy became possible for myriad small Indian tribes. The
network of streams, creeks, and rivers in the Illinois Country created a particular kind of
outpost and frontier community. Opportunities for fluid river trade drew in many Indian
nations. Waterways and river travel established a far-flung contact system, an arterial trade
world on both sides of the Mississippi that the Spanish and the British found impossible to
control. The decade of greatest prosperity for both French and Indians in the Illinois was the
1740’s. By the 1750’s, the penetration of British packtrains and traders, the Scots-Irish
enterprise out of Pennsylvania into the Ohio Valley, began to erode the Long Peace. Chapter
Five is a short examination of how the ominous build-up to the Seven Years War affected the
Illinois settlements. In particular, the rag-tag refugee and trade center of Pickawillany across
the Grand Prairie, dominated by the Miami-British trade coalition, created serious tensions;
the Illinois and Miami Indians shared many blood ties yet were allied to two different
international powers. Both the French and Indians in the single explosive year of 1752 were
attacked by Indian tribes seeking to gain security and power.
18
Two years later, the Seven Years War broke out. Chapter Six begins with a brief
overview of how that war affected the Illinois Country. While no skirmishes or battles took
place there, French military policy took the form of expeditionary supply forces sent out
from Fort Chartres into the Ohio Valley. The cession of trade convoys by the end of the war
severely stressed both the French and Indians in the area. Significant population shifts had
emptied out the farming lands. Chapter Six also looks at the interaction of the arriving
British in 1765 with impoverished and at times, even starving French and Indian populations.
It was during the British tenancy that the buffalo herds of the Illinois began to be decimated.
With the changes in the provisioning trade, Illinois Indians lost the means to compete with
the powerful tribes across the Mississippi. The Osage in particular entered the resurgent
deerskin trade with a vengeance, monopolizing the trade to a large extent because they were
horse rich. Chapter Seven examines the role of the horse in the deerskin trade. Without
horses, Illinois Indians could not compete. They found another means of survival under
British rule: the peddling of information. Chapter Eight, titled “Land of Rumor,” describes
the experiences of all three populations, French, Illinois Indians, and the British in the Illinois
Country across one decade: 1768 – 1778. While some tentative re-knitting of old trade
relationships began under British merchants, the hostility of northern Indian tribes to the
British after Pontiac’s War – and by extension, to the Illinois Indians who were depending on
the British – prevented any enduring prosperity or renascence of Indian populations. The
world these people were all living in was beginning to be seriously depleted of animals,
birds, and trees. Traces of those losses remain tantalizing in the record, a mixed report of
“abundance” juxtaposed against stories of burning fort pickets for fuel and the trading of
French rum for meat. Illinois Indians were selling their land to Anglo-American speculators
19
in exchange for horses and flour. It was only toward the end of the 1770’s that French
traders began to establish new enterprises at Cahokia, for instance, and a fresh trade in
French ponies developed. The study of the watery world ends with the arrival of the
Americans into the Illinois in 1778. They found a recovering landscape nonetheless
permanently changed through losses of some animal populations and old-growth oaks. Then,
under the aggressive agriculture of the settler wave from Kentucky lands, the Illinois earth
began to dry out. The installation of ceramic drainage tiles in the nineteenth century became
the last step in the two hundred year process of converting a complicated ecosystem. From a
lush, arboreal-prairie land, drenched with so much water it was seen through a shimmering
lens by the first Europeans, the Illinois today is packed with monocultural fields that are only
sometimes, down on the floodplain, glinting with that old, insidious moisture.
In two areas, this study has been strictly delimited. The first concerns the Kaskaskia
Indians. The experience of the Kaskaskia under the tutelage of the Jesuits is distinct and
viewed by many (church historians in particular) as “the successful one.” Such a view is
clearly articulated in Mary Borgias Palm’s The Jesuit Missions of the Illinois Country 16731763 (1931), a meticulously-researched and valuable published dissertation. Palm used
French documents in the original, including many letters and memoirs from Canadian
archives, and she included even a separate coda on the Kaskaskia Indian Mission. Especially
after 1703, when the Kaskaskia relocated to the southern Illinois Country from the Starved
Rock-Peoria area, they readily adopted European agricultural and religious practices,
embracing wheat and maize farming, draft animals, the wheeled French plow, hogs,
chickens, and Catholicism. Their story has been told by historians and archaeologists,
especially in Palm, but also in Natalia Belting’s Kaskaskia Under the French Regime (1975)
20
and Carl J. Ekberg’s critically-important study of French agriculture. The historical journal
literature also contains some good studies of the Kaskaskia Indians.18 Because they were the
most successfully-converted tribe at the French Jesuit missions, there are many more extant
church records of them, with references to marriages, baptisms, deaths, and witness roles.
Jesuit priests left detailed accounts of ministering to the Kaskaskia. Europeans arriving at the
French settlements almost always commented on their village, the largest, most thriving
Illinois Indian settlement. Many left approving remarks about the progressive civilization of
the Kaskaskia. While the Kaskaskia continued to maintain their winter and summer hunts,
also living in traditional woven cattail lodges, their primary relationship with the land across
the eighteenth century is documented as agricultural. Carl J. Ekberg’s discussion of French
agriculture and land tenure at French Kaskaskia is one of the most extensive in French Roots
in the Illinois Country.19
In comparison, so little is known about or has been written about the Mechigamea that
they are often referred to as “the mysterious Mechigamea.” The history of the Cahokia and
the French on the earliest 1699 grant is also extremely sketchy, limited to the letters of the
Seminarian priests who attempted an agricultural base there. For an environmental historian,
establishing the nature of the first European-Indian-land relationships is the most important.
Patterns were set, animosities and allegiances arising predictably out of land use and control
and resultant changes in the environment; cultural differences were sometimes forged into
cultural similarities by the exigencies of survival. While studies of the Kaskaskia and their
agriculture are important, the dominant symbol linking the rest of the Illinois nations with the
18
For instance, see Robert M. Owens’ “Jean Baptiste Ducoigne, the Kaskaskias, and the Limits of Thomas
Jefferson’s Friendship,” Journal of Illinois History, Volume 5 (2), Summer, 2002.
19
Carl Ekberg’s study of the French colonies along the Mississippi as well as his early work on St. Genevieve
across the river in Missouri are the first histories to document differing settlement trajectories for each of the
five French villages.
21
French, the British, and the riverine environment is not an amber spring wheat stalk but a
pelt. This study therefore omits the Kaskaskia Indians and French Kaskaskia as a chapter.
Secondly, unlike other environmental histories which include all populations using a
given land, this study does not investigate the slave population of French and Indian Illinois.
The numbers of African slaves in the settlements were at first small, growing from an initial
population of around 200 brought in by the miner-entrepreneur Philip Renault in 1724 to
furnish labor for mining schemes. Most of these slaves ended up on Kaskaskia wheat farms.
Their increase across fifty years brought their numbers at Kaskaskia to nearly 300, while the
total white population at Kaskaskia was just above 600 (from a census conducted by the
British in 1766); these slaves remained concentrated in the southernmost part of the French
settlements. The French and Indians themselves also used Indian slaves, identified as panis,
a term which may relate to the tribal designation Padoucah (Apache or Comanche) – the
southwestern plains tribes from whom Missouri Indians in particular obtained slaves in raids
and warfare.20 These Indian slaves, often arriving in the Illinois settlements as small
children, remain some of the most shadowy, lost figures in the historical human occupancy of
the area. Traces of them in documents are extremely rare. Names of both African and Indian
slaves do appear in church records, especially in the early decades of the 1720’s and 1730’s.
Slaves are listed in property inventories for French estates and willed away as property;
during the French exodus in the early 1760’s, many slaves crossed the river into Missouri,
where their descendants, still enslaved, became central to the bloody conflict in that state one
hundred years later. French slavery has been best documented by both Carl Ekberg and
20
An exciting new study of the Indian slave trade of the Southwest establishes how common the regional
captivity trade was, resulting in massive movements of people and concomitant exchanges of trade and
material culture. See James F. Brooks, Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the
Southwest Borderlands (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2002).
22
Winstanley Briggs, whose 1985 dissertation, “The Lost Colony: Les Pays des Illinois,” as
well as a subsequent article on French Illinois and slavery furnish good numbers and
explanations for the slave as a social member.21 Ekberg has done exemplary work with the
slave and free black population of Ste. Genevieve in the 1790’s, where artisanal and trade
records can trace their ascendancy. There is scant evidence relating to slaves on the eastern
shore as fur trappers and hunters, or slaves interacting with Indian populations. The
opaqueness of French church and notarial records, the unbendable, unchanging legal forms
and language, and finally, the very low literacy level of the French population obscure
fundamental relationships: slave to Indian, slave to land and river. This elision becomes even
more distressing when placed next to other environmental histories of colonial cultures, such
as Timothy Silver’s 1990 study, A New Face on the Countryside: Indians, Colonists, and
Slaves in the South Atlantic Forests, 1500 – 1800 or Daniel J. Usner’s important riverine
trade analysis, Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: the Lower
Mississippi Valley Before 1763 (1992). The Watery World acknowledges the presence of
slaves without even being able to detail whether they routinely used the Mississippi River to
supplement the French diet with channel catfish or turtles, both of which were exploited by
hungry British soldiers in the 1760’s. The questions posed by Timothy Silver in his
introduction in general guide this study: “How did these humans alter their environment?
How did their environment change them? How did they change each other?”22 Yet for
African slaves in the Illinois Country, the answers to most of these questions remain buried.23
21
See Winstanley Briggs, “Slavery in French Colonial Illinois,” Chicago History 18 (Winter 1989 – 90) as well
as “Les Pays des Illinois,” The William & Mary Quarterly 3rd Serial, Vol. 47 (1), January, 1990.
22
Timothy Silver, A New Face on the Countryside: Indians, Colonists, and Slaves in the South Atlantic
Forests, 1500 – 1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 6. Silver’s study owes a debt to two
landmark works of environmental history that document in unsentimental and rigorous ways Indian impact on
land: William Cronon’s Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England (1983 ),
23
It is only in the last twenty years that rivers have begun to generate riparian studies among
environmental and economic historians. With few exceptions, these studies have been
focused on the colonial and antebellum South. Rivers shape human history in ways distinct
from other settlement narratives; transportation patterns, agricultural potential, Native
American populations, as well as alluvial soils and floodplain inundation have combined to
produce individuated regional river histories. Because rivers have been vital irrigants of the
first successful agricultural crops produced by Europeans, the studies of human and river
histories tend to have been in the North American South and Middle Atlantic. Jack Temple
Kirby’s Poquosin: A Study of Rural Landscape Ecology (1995) and Mart Stewart’s ‘What
Nature Suffers To Groe:’ Life, Labor, and Landscape on the Georgia Coast, 1500 – 1800,”
(1990) are two of the best studies of colonial river environments and human efforts to extract
a living from them. Other historians have sketched out the historical determinants of land and
soil in studies of broader social institutions. One of the clearest of these is Phillip Morgan’s
Slave Counterpoint (2000), in which Morgan builds contrasting white-slave societies that
arise from two dictating soils: the wheat country of the Chesapeake riverine matrix and the
inundated, soupy, rice country Carolina lowlands. Despite a relative geographic adjacency,
humans lived differently on these lands, he argues. Their patterns of foraging, sustenance,
family life, their housing, clothing, pastimes, the relationships between slaves and masters
and even the circadian rhythms of daily living were stamped by water and earth. Slave
Counterpoint is not recognized as an environmental history, yet its opening chapters clearly
make the same arguments that other environmental historians of American history have been
and Richard White’s Land Use, Environment, and Social Change; the shaping of Island County, Washington
(1980).
23
Charles J. Balesi includes a chapter on African slaves in the Illinois in The Time of the French in the Heart of
North America 1673 – 1818 (1991).
24
making. The recovery of lived experience of the past, no matter who was living it, should
include an understanding and recognition of the natural world as a shaping force.
Only recently has the Mississippi River become attractive to historians interested in
cultural and social histories developing in unique ways beside a long, snaking waterway
densely peopled with aboriginals. The challenge of this study has been to write a history that
is both narrow and wide. Questions relating to repeated use of land in key locations, to
fluctuation in animal and bird populations, and to the movement of rivers and people on
rivers are explored in the context of external forces of empire and war. What happened one
day in the Illinois of the eighteenth century is as important as what happened there over the
sweep of time in the eighteenth century. The Watery World is a history of the people on the
ground, to borrow a phrase from Geoffrey Plank’s study of French Acadia, An Unsettled
Conquest: the British Campaign against the peoples of Acadia (2001). It is also a study of
the ground itself. In the signifying of land formations and settlements with joint IndianFrench place names, in the way the French and Algonquin languages combined to inscribe a
small area with familiarity and recognition, and in the shared culture of both the horse and
the boat, the Indians and the French of the Illinois occupied a common landscape for eighty
years. Their lives were what they were, neither failed experiments nor disorderly and
indefinite fragments of larger empires. They changed the land they lived on, and were in turn
changed by it, and therein lies a tale.
25
The Watery World: Illinois Country Ecology
Along the Mississippi River in the eighteenth century, sandhill cranes rose ponderously
from a morass of shore vegetation, scrub willow and bulrushes trembling with clouds of
biting insects. At times of flood, backwater sloughs trapped catfish described in the late
1790’s as “monstrous” and of “uncommon size.”1 Sometimes, especially at high water,
water moccasin ribboned palely around submerged trunks, churning against the current. At
times of low water, in the hot mid-summer seasons, sounds carried: terrapins hitting the
current in splashing waves from half-submerged logs, or the startled liftoff of waterfowl –
teal, swans, and pelicans – through the heavy air. These water birds, “such as are seen in the
sea-coast colonies, [were] in the greatest variety and abundance.”2 Yet this aquatic world
was not the lower bayou country of southern Louisiana but the Illinois Country far to the
north, the stretch of fecund, alluvial river plain along the Mississippi that would eventually
be known as part of the American Bottom.3 This land was transformed through settlement
processes into a high-yielding agricultural basin claimed by vigorous row crops. Beginning
in the 1880’s, a system of drainage ditches, levees, and subsoil tile subdued and managed the
1
Gilbert Imlay, A Topographical Description of the Western Territory of North America, 3rd Edition (London:
J. Debrett, 1797), p. 504; see also letter from Major Butricke at Fort Chartres, 1768, describing catfish of 100
pounds or more he encountered in the lower Ohio River, printed in Theodore Calvin Pease, Illinois Historical
Collections, Vol. 29, Illinois on the Eve of the Seven Years War (Springfield: Illinois State Historical Library,
1940), p. 409.
2
Imlay, A Topographical Description, p. 504.
3
Although the terms “Illinois Country” and “the Illinois” are used interchangeably by French, British, and
American writers across the eighteenth century, the clearest definition of the geographic area is provided by the
British Lieutenant Eddington in 1765: “The Country of the Illinoise is very extensive, comprehending all the
Country on the East Side of the Mississippi from about thirty leagues above the mouth of the Ohio to a
considerable distance above the mouth of the Illinoise River junction with the Mississippi. The name of
Illinoise applies to all the Country on both sides of the Illinoise River and E. of the Mississippi almost to the
bottom of Lake Michigan, the latter formerly the Illinoise Lake.” See “Journal of Lt. Eddington or the
Surgeon,” in Robert Carroon, ed., Broadswords & Bayonets: The Journals of the expedition under the
command of Captain Thomas Stirling of the 42nd regiment of Foot, Royal Highland Regiment (The Black
Watch) to occupy Fort Chartres in the Illinois Country, August 1765 to January 1766 (The Society of Colonial
Wars in the State of Illinois, 1984), p. 89.
26
water. Today, Illinois is part of the bread basket of the Midwest. Across her rolling, central
prairies march hybrid corn species, shoulder to shoulder in immense waves. Down on the
floodplain of the Mississippi, between Kaskaskia and Cahokia, the corn continues, coating
the old French common fields, filling in the soil to the last inch between the levees and the
river bluffs with a virile green. At mid-eighteenth century, however, this land inhabited by
successive waves of humans across eight thousand years and most recently, by French
colonists, was a watery world.
Crescent lakes formed by the cut-through action of the Mississippi, marshlands, and
sloughs filled with standing water released significant amounts of moisture into the
atmosphere. The first histories of St. Clair, Randolph, and Monroe Counties, early formed
from the Illinois Territory in the 1780’s and 90’s, are filled with references to lakes. The
upland regions contained sloughs of “hundreds of acres in extent.”4 An account of the
“great hurricane” of 1805 describes how the winds sucked all the water from a portion of the
Mississippi and “the lakes in the American Bottom.”5 While some sloughs and marshes were
wet year-round, the hot, sometimes arid summers of the Illinois Country more often
produced a drying-out effect. Historical atlases refer to “periodical marshes” appearing after
severe rains on the upland inundated the sandy soil.6 In these initial counties, early mills
erected by American settlers after 1785 were known as “wet-weather” mills, suspending
operation after the summer droughts.7 In 1804, when surveyors working to lay Thomas
Jefferson’s rectilinear imprint on the Illinois Country began marking off range and section on
4
Brink, McDonough and Co., History of St. Clair County (Philadelphia: 1881), p. 30.
J.L. McDonough & Co., The Combined History of Randolph, Monroe and Perry Counties, Illinois,
(Philadelphia: 1883), p. 82.
6
Brink, McDonough, and Co., An Illustrated Historical Atlas Map of Monroe County (Philadelphia: 1875), p.
11.
7
Ibid., p. 11
5
27
the upland and central prairies of the Illinois Territory, they left descriptions of the land. “A
very large portion of this land is prairie – and it is a fact yielded by all observers, that the
interior or middle regions of the larger prairies are always low and covered with lakes and
ponds of water...."8
The hydrologic cycle here must have been remarkable. As late as mid-nineteenth century,
there are accounts of torrential rainstorms on the upland ridge country that sent waterfalls
bursting from the rocky faces of the bluffs.9 In the 1790’s, the British traveler Gilbert Imlay
described the pocking and channeling of the limestone bluffs. These bluffs, he wrote, “are
from 100 to 130 feet high, divided in several places by deep cavities, through which many
small rivulets pass before they fall into the Mississippi.”10 One spectacular waterfall in what
would become St. Clair County was early used by French missionaries for communal
baptism of Indians. Christened “L’eau Tomb” by the French, it later became “Falling
Springs” for the Americans.11 The water table on both the upland and river plain was much
higher than that of today, yielding a rich tributary system of creeks and streams; in addition,
the quality of natural springs and wells is described in early historical accounts as “cool,
sweet, generally hard water.” The first American upland settlements in the 1780’s clustered
near the large, clear, gushing spring the French named La Belle Fontaine; although they did
not settle there, the French knew of these higher country springs, for they named both the
spring and its surrounding open land: the Prairie of Apacois. This word may have been
borrowed from the Illinois Indians, who, according to the Frenchman Deliette in 1678, called
the reeds used to cover their cabins “apacoya.” The Prairie of Apacois may thus have had a
8
American State Papers: Public Lands, Vol. 5, p. 168.
History of Monroe County, p. 11.
10
Gilbert Imlay, A Topographical Description, p. 55.
11
History of St. Clair County, p. 31.
9
28
marshy area where cattails and bullrushes once grew.12 So important was La Belle Fontaine
spring to American settlement that by 1800, a third of the 960 recorded settlers in the area
lived in its vicinity.13 Wells on the upland were sunk from ten to eighty feet, and the
nineteenth century geographer who recorded these observations perceived that the water was
“inexhaustible.”14
The rough quadrilateral of southern Illinois enclosed by the Mississippi, Wabash, and
Ohio Rivers was often a saturated country.15 Bisected also by the Kaskaskia River, it was
interspersed with semi-mesic prairies where undulant, higher ground allowed for better
drainage and thus, for intermittent burning of the vegetation by humans. The first history of
St. Clair County estimated that the relative proportion of “open and woodland is as six to
one.”16 It is likely that the “open” described in such accounts included a number of hill
prairies, a particular kind of small prairie found only on the south or southwestward slopes of
hills. This may account for the use of the word “dotted” in early descriptions of the uplands
of Randolph and Monroe Counties. Early settlers also wrote and spoke of “oak openings”
and “barrens” in terms that at times seem synonymous.17 Larger, more level openings such
as the Twelve Mile or Horse Prairie attracted bands of wild horses or were used by the
12
Kaskaskia Manuscripts, 82:8:5:1 and 82: 7:9:1; Pierre Deliette, “Memoir of De Gannes Concerning the
Illinois Country,” in T. C. Pease, The French Foundations 1680-1693 (Springfield: Illinois State Historical
Library, 1934) p. 340.
13
Census of 1800, St. Clair County, Illinois Territory, cited in John W. Allen, It Happened in Southern Illinois
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University, 1968), p. 349.
14
Monroe County History, p. 11.
15
For the concept of an enclosing quadrilateral, see Edward Countryman, “Indians, the Colonial Order, and the
Social Significance of the American Revolution,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, Vol. 53 (2),
April, 1996, pp. 342 – 362.
16
History of St. Clair County, p. 30.
17
See J. White, “How the Terms Savanna, Barrens, and Oak Openings Were Used in Early Illinois,” in J.S.
Fralish et al., Living in the Edge: Proceedings of the North American Conference on Savannas and Barrens,
Illinois State University, Normal, Illinois, October 15-16, 1994 (Great Lakes National Program Office: U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency, 1994), pp. 25-63.
29
French for the grazing of black cattle.18 These level mesic prairies often became the
“periodical marshes” in wet seasons. The Illinois Country in the late eighteenth century was
a diverse and changeable ecosystem.
Yet the first histories, valuable as they are, record the area one hundred years after the
period addressed in this study. It is striking that travelers’ accounts and military
correspondence of the French, British and Americans – who criss-crossed the Illinois
Country between 1763 and the 1790’s – mention the presence of water almost always in
extremes. The major floods of the Mississippi, those inundated years of 1725, 1772, and
1785, are dramatically recorded. The flood of 1785, “the greatest of the last century,” forced
the French of Kaskaskia and Cahokia up to bluffs and swept away the western walls of stone
Fort Chartres near Prairie du Rocher. To the French, 1785 was “the year of the great
waters.”19 Accounts abound of George Rogers Clark’s 1779 march to Vincennes, when he
and his men waded thigh, waist, and shoulder-deep in icy water much of the way. Yet little
appears in routine military and political correspondence about the role of water in this
common riverine world. The action of the Mississippi, fed not only by swollen tributary flow
from the Missouri but by consistent hydrologic cycles of great rains and waterfalls, routinely
affected the lives of humans. In 1765, for instance, notarial records for Kaskaskia list a “sale
at public auction of a house and two arpent lot at New Chartres, soon to be washed away by
the Mississippi.”20
18
See Major Butricke letter, September 15, 1768, in Clarence Alvord and Clarence Carter, Trade and Politics
1767 – 1769 (Springfield, Illinois: Illinois State Historical Library, 1921), p. 411; Carl J. Ekberg, French Roots
in the Illinois Country: The Mississippi Frontier in Colonial Times (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998),
p. 82.
19
History of Randolph, Monroe, and Perry Counties, Illinois, p. 75; E.W. Gould, Gould’s History of River
Navigation (Saint Louis: Nixon-Jones Printing Co., 1889), p. 246.
20
Kaskaskia MS, 65:6:29:1.
30
Water affected health, travel, roads, soil fertility and annual yields. From early American
settlement records are accounts of the “sickening” of the water in wells, even on the upland
ridges. Drought was as real to these communities as flood. Despite glowing affidavits to the
deeper well water in the Illinois Country, early geographers also speak of “indifferent
water…obtained from shallow wells and stagnant pools” and “air…laden with malaria from
the decay of the exuberant growth of vegetation.”21 Great fevers often raged through the
floodplain. Father Gibault, arriving in Illinois Country in the fall of 1768, became almost
immediately ill with a fever which plagued him on and off until 1770.22 Earlier, in 1752, the
French commander Macarty Mactigue wrote of the inadvisability of building barracks next to
the ramparts of a fort on the Kaskaskia River: “...since they would be quite unsanitary due to
the humidity of the ground, which would make them dungeons rather than barracks, and
would cause much sickness.”23 In times of low water or ice plating on the river surfaces,
keelboats and military supply flotilla could not progress smoothly up rivers, and the fluctuant
nature of the major rivers used for such transport – the Mississippi, Kaskaskia, Ohio, and
Wabash – specifically affected the outcome of military operations in the Illinois Country.
After a tedious and exhausting cordelling of his military keelboats between the mouth of the
Ohio River and Kaskaskia, for instance, Major Butricke, on his way to Fort Chartres in 1768
wrote, “…the Navigation so much interrupted by great quantities of trees that falls with the
Banks of the River and drives with fluds [sic] in the springs, that we many times Rowd for 3
and four hours and did not gain one mile….this I think was the most dangerous and fatiguing
21
Brink 1881, cited in Robert Mazrim, Now Quite Out of Society” Archaeology and Frontier Illinois (Illinois
Department of Transportation, 2002), p. 55.
22
Father Meurin to Bishop Briand, June 14, 1769, cited in Joseph P. Donnelly, Pierre Gibault, Missionary 17371802 (Chicago, Illinois: Loyola University Press, 1971), p. 42.
23
Macarty and Buchet to Vaudreuil, January 15, 1752, in Theodore Calvin Pease, Illinois on the Eve of the
Seven Years War 1747-1755 (Springfield: Illinois State Historical Society, 1940), p. 424.
31
journey I ever made….”24 Sixteen years earlier, the French commandant at Fort Chartres had
similar complaints about the Kaskaskia River: “From this day to the seventh, when I reached
the mouth of the Kaskaskia, I had some boats fail every day. As the water was extremely low
I was obliged to unload all the cargo at the mouth of that river.”25 Yet traveler accounts,
military journals, and political correspondence concerning settlement often stress only the
positives: soil fertility, the open parkland of the (burned-off) upland prairies, the diversity of
plants and animals, and the beauty of the land. In 1698 Father Hennepin inaugurated a long
line of glowing impressionistic accounts of the Illinois Country by writing: “The Country
beyond those Hills is so fine and pleasant, that according to the Account I have had, one
might justly call it the Delight of America.”26
These were ancient glacial lands, scoured by ice, rock, water, and wind, molded by a
giant river in a diverse floodplain. The Mississippi in fact had occupied at least one other
valley, a wide bed to the southwest of its present course. Ninety percent of Illinois was
covered by glaciers in the late Pleistocene; the effect of so much “funneled” water pouring
into the glacier-scoured depressions during withdrawal and melting created an enormous
embayment there.27 Drainage from the Missouri and Illinois Rivers in this American
Bottom creates a wide basin of converging waters from a significant portion of North
America. The Mississippi itself continues to scour, dredge, and mold the lands around it.
The “excavating power” of this river, built up on both banks by extensive comminuted
materials, makes it dynamic and changeable, violently capricious in the era before hydrologic
24
Major Butricke to Barnley, September 15, 1768, in Alvord and Carter, Trade & Politics p. 411.
Macarty to Vaudreuil, January 20, 1752, in Pease, Illinois on the Eve, p. 432-433.
26
Father Louis Hennepin, A New Discovery of a Vast Country in America, Vol. I, ed. by Reuben Gold Thwaites
(Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co., 1903), p. 186.
27
Edward B. Jelks, Carl J. Ekberg, and Terrance C. Martin, Excavations at the Laurens Site: probable location
of Fort de Chartres I (Springfield: Illinois Historic Preservation Agency, 1989) p. 15; Charles J. Bareis and
James W. Porter, American Bottom Archaeology: A Summary of the FAI-270 Project Contribution to the
Culture History of the Mississippi River Valley (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), p. 3.
25
32
engineering and flood control.28 The first geologic studies of the Mississippi documented
that in flood, it could cover thirty miles, its “ordinary channel marked by an outline of
woods.”29 Sedimentation studies conducted in the early twentieth century found that at times
of high water, the Mississippi between St. Genevieve, Missouri, and Cape Girardeau could
“roll cobbles and boulders as big as a man’s head along the bottom of the main channel.”30
Writers describing the river silt deposited on the lowlands after the spring “overflows” of the
Mississippi have continuously made comparisons to the Nile. Gilbert Imlay saw the “slime
which annual floods of the Mississippi leave on the surface of adjacent shores” as being
comparable to the Nile, “which leaves a similar manure.”31 An early geographer wrote that
as the Mississippi recedes, it “leaves behind in the bottom lands, a sediment as fine and
fertilizing as the Nile mud.”32 American settlers in the early nineteenth century noted that at
times, the level of silt and spring mud left by receding waters could be marked at ten feet on
the cottonwood trunks of the floodplain. These references to the Nile, to manure and
fertilization, probably reflected an understanding of the replenishment processes of the
floods; yet they were also likely referring to smell. During the great Mississippi flood of the
late twentieth century, 1993, the “overflow” waters rose to create silver-surfaced lakes
behind levees and sandbagged walls around Prairie du Rocher. Descending from the bluffs,
anyone approaching the half-submerged town met the smell before seeing the water:
decaying vegetation and organic remains – sometimes farm animals as well as many small,
drowned mammal species – rotting in the trapped runoff.
28
Alvin G. Lugn, Sedimentation in the Mississippi River Between Davenport, Iowa, and Cairo, Illinois (Rock
Island, Illinois: The Augustana Library Publications, 1927), p. 83; J.W. Foster, The Mississippi Valley: Its
Physical Geography (Chicago: S.C. Griggs and Company, 1869), p. 9; see also discussion of river “dynamism”
in Jelks, Ekberg, and Martin, Excavations at the Laurens Site, p. 19.
29
Foster, The Mississippi Valley, p. 9.
30
Lugn, Sedimentation, p. 83.
31
Imlay, Topographical Descriptions, p. 405.
32
Foster, The Mississippi Valley, p. 8.
33
Yet the Illinois Country was not defined solely by the Mississippi, great trade artery that it
was. Eighteenth century observers of the Ohio and Wabash Rivers have also testified to the
overflow appearance of flooded lands. Near the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi, in
Massac County, in fact, the land was known as the Black Bottoms, a “den of ponds and
swamps.”33 Advancing into the Illinois Country in 1765, Captain Thomas Stirling noted that
the land on either side of the Ohio River was “full of aquaticks.”34 In 1788, General Harmar
wrote to the Secretary of War that “from Fort Massac to the mouth of the Ohio, and from
thence about twenty miles up the Mississippi, the country overflows, and is by no means
habitable.”35 Gilbert Imlay noted that the land at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi
had been built up about “twenty feet higher than the common surface of these rivers,” yet the
spring floods were “so considerable” as to “overflow the country for a week, as far inland as
several miles.”36 As late as 1816, a traveler to the Wabash Country wrote, “In times of high
water, it is one of the most difficult countries to travel through I ever saw. I have known it for
more than four weeks at one time that no person could get away from Union Prairie without
swimming his horse, or going in a boat.”37 A pattern emerges in reading these kinds of
comments about the Illinois Country: the contrast between low and high ground, between
33
Glenn J. Speed, Ghost Towns of Southern Illinois (Royalton, Illinois: 1977), p. 131; see also Victor Collot’s
observations on the Illinois side of the Ohio River and the Black Bottoms, in 1796. Collot wrote that his party
“perceived nothing but a vast extent of low and swampy ground.” In A Journey to North America, Containing a
Survey of the Countries Watered by the Mississippi, Ohio, Missouri, and Other Affluing Rivers; With Exact
Observations on the Course, and Soundings of these Rivers; and on the Towns, Villages, Hamlets, and Farms of
that Part of the New-World; Followed by Philosophical, Political, Military, and Commercial Remarks and By a
Protected Line of Frontiers and General Limits, Vol.1 (Firenze: O. Lange, 1924) p. 190).
34
Captain Thomas Stirling, in Broadswords and Bayonets: The Journals of the expedition under the command
of Captain Thomas Stirling, edited by Robert G. Carroon (The Society of Colonial Wars in the State of Illinois,
1984), p. 43.
35
General Harmar to the Secretary of War, January 10, 1788, cited in St. Clair Papers, p. 38.
36
Imlay, A Topographical Description, p. 499.
37
Thomas’ Travels in the West, cited in William Hayden English, Conquest of the Country Northwest of the
River Ohio 1777-1783: and life of General George Rogers Clark (Indianapolis: Bowen-Merrill Co., 1896,
1985), p.. 302.
34
wet and dry seasons. The action of glaciers and abrading rivers chopped the earth into a
configuration of uplands and river bottom that very early created a dual subsistence pattern.
This pattern was determined by the marching back of highly-differentiated land and water
habitats. The American Bottom drifts downward toward the Mississippi in a three-part
succession. The uplands, or till plain, often described in accounts as “rolling,” was laid over
bedrock by the shoveling edge of the glaciers. The loess here is glacier outwash. When
Europeans settled the area, they found it intermittently forested by Southern hardwoods,
stands of oak and hickory varieties often standing “fair and apart” from each other in sunny
oak forests, bespeaking a long-standing practice of prairie burning that created a park-like
atmosphere.38 The presence of so many oaks was incredible natural bounty for white tail
deer, who gorge on acorns each fall; oaks would also play a part in the roaming hog herds
encouraged by the early French and later by the Americans, those drifts of half-wild pigs who
feasted on the acorn mast of these shadowed oak forests. Till plain ran to the edge of
limestone bluffs. These bluffs are most dramatic between Alton, Illinois, and the mouth of
the Illinois River; yet, especially between Prairie du Rocher and Kaskaskia in Randolph
County, they also jut straight up in a rocky escarpment. It is an absolutely vertical and
dramatic rise, contributing a strong sense of isolation and seclusion to the villages on the
floodplain. Most important, these bluffs function as a severe demarcation between the
lowlands and the uplands.
The top of the bluffs holds mature plains. The French of Prairie du Rocher who settled on
the floodplain below drove their livestock up to these plains, choosing to locate their grazing
lands on top of the bluffs after an original common grazing lands along the Mississippi
38
See “A Fire-Dominated Landscape,” in J. White, A Survey of Native Vegetation in the Big Rivers Blufflands of
Calhoun, Greene, and Jersey Counties with Recommendations for Protection, Restoration, and Management,
(Urbana, Illinois: Illinois Department of Natural Resources, 2001), p. 19.
35
proved inadequate. The initial commons was on a marsh called the Marais Gossiaux. So wet
was this area, the floodplain between Cahokia and Kaskaskia, that the French farming lands,
those longlot strips so ubiquitous to French settlements everywhere in North America, were
run in long arpents straight back to the base of the bluffs. The historian of French agriculture
in the American Bottom, Carl J. Ekberg, describes “significant portions” of the plowland
there as “wasteland” occupied by “coppices, ponds, and marshes.”39 The initial French
settlements, depicted in a 1734 map by Ignace-Francoise Broutin, engineer, lay wholly on the
river floodplain, and no settlements appear on the bluffs. The road, however, that connected
these necklace villages ran on the floodplain at the base of the bluffs (and still does) between
Prairie du Rocher and Kaskaskia. It rises to the bluff level between Fort Chartres and
Cahokia near the present-day village of Fults.40 This road follows a natural declivity in the
bluffs identified in the late eighteenth century as “Le Grande Passe.”41 It is significant that
the road rises through “le grande passe” just here: the flooding around the Fort Chartres area
was extensive and relentless. Settlement, agriculture, and transportation adapted to the
amount of water in a flux and flow environment.
The social and political history of the period between 1699 and the 1780’s constitutes a
small segment of interaction and occupation in the American Bottom. These years saw
arrivals of different groups intent on invasive and opportunistic uses of resources. For over
sixty years, the French occupied five small villages and drew from the Illinois lands an
agrarian gold: French wheat. They also harvested a glut of furs. The British control of the
39
Ekberg, French Roots, p. 79-80.
Ekberg, French Roots, p. 79.
41
See map labeled “Carte de la Pays des Illinois ca. 1752, in Winstanley Briggs, “The Forgotten Colony: Le
Pays des Illinois”, (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Chicago, 1985), p. 88. Briggs’ map is a
composite based on the U.S. Geological Survey of 1956 and the Nicolas de Finiels 1797 map, “La Louisiane
Superieure”).
40
36
Illinois Country, lasting for only ten years, followed by the period of Virginian Anarchy (a
term used conveniently by Clarence Alvord), blew apart an intricately-functioning natural
economy already in the process of change. That world had been built by humans who had
learned to glean from three different natural environments, and whose patterns of mobility
effectively linked those environments through food production, trade, hunting, and the
gathering of aquatic and upland resources. These humans were first a series of prehistoric
aboriginal groups, followed by the Illinois Confederate Tribes of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, and last, the Illinoisian French. With the entrance of the occupying
British, environmental change, always ongoing, accelerated. As just one instance,
archaeological analysis of latrine pit remains at Fort Chartres, dating from the British
occupation, reveals the presence of great numbers (a marked increase) of red-eared turtle or
“slider” shells. Also found were remains indicating the “importance of domesticated
animals” as well as white-tailed deer.42 Clearly the British were attempting to hold onto the
diet they were familiar with, including, possibly, turtle soup! The effect of the British
occupation on the French and the Indians in the American Bottom is the content of later
chapters.
At the same time, it is important to establish the connections between how Indians used
and imprinted land and how the incoming French (after 1699) may have profited from those
patterns. Humans living in the American Bottom from the Late Woodland and emergent
Mississippian cultures onward (circa 400 A.D) utilized its tri-part ecological divisions. On
the loess hill-prairies of the bluffs grew spurge and stiff bedstraw, adapted by Indians as
medicinal herbs.43 Archaeological excavations of numerous American Bottom sites have
42
43
Jelks, Ekberg, and Martin, Excavations at the Laurens Site, p. 10.
Jelks, Ekberg, and Martin, Excavations, p. 19.
37
revealed a “broad tool inventory” including projectile points, knives, scrapers, gouges,
gravers, choppers, anvilstones, metates, and celts.44 Archaeologists posit that possibly,
Indians occupied the uplands on a year-round basis by the beginning of the Mississippian
phase (circa 1000 AD). They were growing tobacco and later, maize. The broad tool
inventory, along with faunal remains, suggests a strong diversity in diet and subsistence
patterns. Upland sites reveal the importance of deer, turkey, and grouse. Such upland bird
species, especially, thrive in open, grassy environments.
Ecologists have identified the “maintenance and possible enlargement” of prairie lands
through the practice of annual or periodic burning.45 The burning of prairies by both Indians
and early white settlers is documented in accounts ranging from Father Hennepin (1683) and
Father Vivier (1750) – who both wrote about the burning practices of Illinois Indians
specifically – to explicit descriptions of mid-nineteenth century agricultural fires set by
settlers on prairie margins.46 There is a vast literature on the role of burning in
environmental change. Central debates no longer revolve around indigenous firing practices
as evidence of complex agricultural adaptation. The questions concern the degree of change
perpetuated by routine prairie and woodland burnings, and how the tongues of black prairie
extruding into the upland woodlands in, for instance, the Illinois Country, may or may not
have been “created” by aboriginal practices. Some of the earliest accounts by white observers
of prairie burning occur only a few miles from the American Bottom. For instance, in 1796,
Victor Collot, a French spy sent to America after the French Revolution, traveled on the
Prairie du Rocher-Cahokia Road. He observed a grassy meadow, known in later years as the
44
Barreis and Porter, eds., American Bottom Archaeology, p. 132.
Omer C. Stewart, Forgotten Fires: Native Americans and the Transient Wilderness (Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 2002), p. 126.
46
See Stewart’s discussion, Forgotten Fires, pp. 118-119.
45
38
Storment property, that had clearly been recently burned: “The singular aspect of this
country can be attributed only to a custom among the Indians of setting fires every autumn to
the grass and dead leaves of the forests.”47 Another observer, the Philadelphia businessman
George Hunter, wrote that the trees on the Storment property “...were chiefly Oaks whose
groughths [sic] have been repeatedly stinted by the annual burning of the long grass and
weeds as they got dry at the end of the year.”48 Although by that year, 1796, American
settlement of the upland prairies on the bluffs above the old French colonies had proceeded
apace, spurred on by the 1795 Treaty of Greenville, Indians were still burning land. That they
had done so as well across the years of French occupation is a strong conclusion. Omer
Stewart’s insistence that fire was a “multipurpose tool” has import for historical studies. Why
and how were Indians in the protohistoric and historic periods using fire? Leaving aside the
use of fire in agriculture, some interesting trends can be identified.
Evidence of aboriginal burning of hill prairies on these bluffs has suggested to some
researchers that they were used as lookout points.49 Surely anyone who has ever stood on the
bluffs above old Fort Gage at Kaskaskia can attest to the view. The Mississippi Valley lies
below with a consummate clarity: the river in its sinuous curves could be assessed
immediately for the presence of any kind of approaching bateaux, canoe, or keelboat. Smoke
rising from even a single campfire deep in the floodplain forests would be visible. Ecologists
today researching the changes in ridgetop prairies use early accounts spread over three
centuries to trace the changes in the land. In discussing the view described by Timothy Flint
in 1818, for instance, nature preservationists comment on Flint’s “long clear view from atop
47
Victor Collot, A Journey in North America, Vol. 1, p. 244.
J.F. McDermott, ed., The Western Journals of Dr. George Hunter, 1796-1805 (Transactions of the American
Philosophical Society of Philadelphia, 1963), p. 30. I am indebted to John White, Ecological Services, Urbana,
Illinois, for bringing these observations to my attention.
49
Kenneth R. Robertson, et al, “Fifty Years of Change in Illinois Hill Prairies” Erigenia 14, 1995, p. 48.
48
39
the Dividing Ridge of Calhoun County” (farther north, above the American Bottom, near the
confluence of the Illinois and Mississippi Rivers). Flint’s account “suggests he was standing
in a ridgetop prairie,” and “that it seems quite likely that people had long set fire to this ridge
to clear the vegetation as a precaution against surprise and ambush....”50
In addition, the burning of prairie lands was a way to manage game, either in creating the
best possible habitat or to make it possible to hunt certain species more easily. Such burning
practices have a direct bearing on food supply. In 1712, Father Gabriel Marest wrote a
lengthy letter to a fellow Jesuit, Father Germon. He described his return to the Illinois
Missions after a trip up to Michilimackinac. His small party had traveled – as usual – by way
of the portage between the St. Joseph River and the Kankakee (the Huakika), followed by a
navigation down the Illinois, past the Peoria Mission. As his canoe approached the lower
Illinois River, he wrote: “At last we perceived our own dear welcome Country; the wild oxen
and the herds of deer were roving along the bank of the river, and from the canoe we shot
some, now and then, which served for our repasts.”51 These herds of bison and deer were
“roving” on a river floodplain. The transition that Marest observed, between the lower
Illinois River Country and Michilimackinac, may have reflected an environment manipulated
by fire. In 1863, in an article published in the American Journal of Science, Henry
Engelmann wrote that forests were “invading Illinois prairies...since regular burning had
stopped.”52 Engelmann identified the motivations for burning as follows: “to facilitate
hunting, to kill insects and snakes, to remove dry stalks, and to secure better pasture.”53 It is
50
John White, A Survey of Native Vegetation in the Big Rivers Blufflands of Calhoun, Greene, and Jersey
Counties with Recommendations for Protection, Restoration, and Management (Urbana, Illinois: Illinois
Department of Natural Resources, 2001), p. 22.
51
Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed., The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, Vol. LXVI (Cleveland: The Burrows
Brothers Company, 1900), p. 287.
52
Engelmann, cited in Stewart, Forgotten Fires p. 119.
53
Ibid.
40
likely that list is in order of priority. The roving herds of 1712, healthy and abundant, that
allowed canoe parties to select a choice animal for a repast – such options had disappeared by
the mid 1760’s. As explained later in this study, by the time of the War of 1812, the bison
herds were gone.
The few remaining loess hill prairies in Illinois may very well function as the “last living
windows” of the original prairie biome, and thus are invaluable to scientists and historians.54
Such small, isolated hill prairies, one near Fults in Randolph County (the American Bottom),
nonetheless reveal a striking diversity of plants. Steeply sloped and difficult to reach, these
hill prairies lie at the very edge of the river bluffs. While they may have been used for
grazing, it is more likely that the French drove their black cattle farther back to richer prairie
commons. There, cows and “half-wild” French ponies fed on the little and big blue-stem
grasses as well as purple prairie clover that formed the most frequently-occurring ground
covers.55 Most important, these mature bluff and tiny hill prairies can be distinguished from
wet or mesic prairies lying farther inland. Indians and French knew the difference. For
instance, species of wild indigo and wild quinine (Feverfew) are “conspicuous” for their
absence in hill prairies but occur in mesic prairies.56 These are medicinal and cottage
industry plants. That American settlers also distinguished hill prairies is seen in the other
names given them: bluff prairies and goat prairies.57 Even small hill prairies, however, are
liable to contain a wide variety of flora.58 Assessment projects carried out by the Illinois
Department of Natural Resources have produced careful and exhaustive studies of remnant
54
Robertson et al, “Fifty Years of Change,” p. 45.
Robertson et al, “Fifty Years of Change,” p. 46.
56
Ibid.
57
Robertson et al, “Fifty Years of Change,” p. 41.
58
Mark W. Schwartz et al, “The Biogeography of and Habitat Loss on Hill Prairies,” in Conservation in Highly
Fragmented Landscapes (New York: Chapman and Hall, 1997), p. 279.
55
41
prairie communities. One such study, the Kaskaskia River Area Assessment, identifies an
extraordinary species density in small prairie remnants, typically five to six acres. Such areas
may contain as many as 100 to 130 species of vascular plants.59 Over and over, botanists and
ecologists studying the American Bottom stress its ecological diversity.60 Such diversity
contributed in similar ways to both Indian and French resource use and habitat.
Finally, the floodplain itself is also differentiated. Botanists distinguish two types of forest
on the lowlands: the Floodplain Forest and the Lowland-Depressional Forest. Floodplain
forests occur where flooding often and strikingly alters the shorelines of rivers. Here grow
the water-loving cottonwood, sycamore, hackberry, and elm.61 Elm was important to
Mississippi Valley Indians, who removed entire sheets of bark and treated it like plywood to
construct canoes and sometimes, houses.62 The French also constructed bark canoes, but
preferred birch, thus pinpointing the point of origin for such canoes – farther north than the
Illinois Country. (These lighter birch canoes were known as “north canoes”). Although
Indians and French shared resource use of tree bark to cover light river craft, such overlap
seems to have occurred in initial contact years of French settlement, between 1700 and 1720.
Rapidly, the French began to prefer the larger, sturdier pirogue, or hollowed-out boat, which,
in the Illinois Country, was usually made of a single black walnut or cottonwood. Like the
Indians, they also used buffalo skins stretched over willow frames: the bullboat. Light,
strapped-together boats made only of cane were called cajeu and used for quick river
crossings, such as the back-and-forth traffic between Kaskaskia in the Illinois Country and
59
Kaskaskia River Area Assessment, Volume 3: Living Resources, 2000, p. 53.
Remnant or relict studies can function as fairly legitimate predictors of eighteenth century environments.
Personal communication, John White, Ecological Services, Urbana, Illinois, December 5, 2003.
61
Jelks, Ekberg, and Martin, Excavations at the Laurens Site, p. 19.
62
Dan Hechenberger, Nipundikan Organization, personal communication, January 27, 2004.
60
42
St. Genevieve across the Mississippi.63 Willow was an important tree for both Indians and
French, as its light, pliable branches could be easily woven. Unlike elm, which would die
once large sheets of bark were removed, especially if the bark had completely girdled the
tree, willows grow quickly. They take fast root in newly-formed sand bars to create
miniature islands from year to year. These are the water-logged and insect-filled trees that
hang over the soggy marshlands along the river shores. It took the firmer soils farther inland
to attract beech and hickory. Also along the shorelines grew an abundance of cattails and
bulrushes, both used by Illinois Indians in the construction of woven mats. Such mats had
multiple uses, both functional (laid over frames for dwellings) and symbolic, as a form of
communication. References to Indian mats are consistent in the letters of French military
personnel engaged in negotiations. In 1752, Commander Macarty at Fort Chartres described
an Indian chief’s actions: “Then he told me that five days ago he had sent back two mats of
the Piankeshaw who wished to attack here, telling them to leave these lands quiet....”64
Lowland-Depressional Forests supported more oak, hickory and sweet gum as well as red
and silver maples. Because these soils typically contained clay, they did not drain as well,
and “ponding” occurred among these trees. In marshes flourished the roots and tubers that
could be gathered for diet supplementation, including the yellow water lily root (the
macoupin), wild sweet potatoes, Indian turnips, arrowleaves, and cattails.65 Fruits were also
plentiful: the indigenous pawpaw and persimmon, wild grapes, elderberries, gooseberries,
blackberries and strawberries. The aquatic environment of the lowlands furnished a wide
63
N.M. Miller Surrey, The Commerce of Louisiana During the French Regime: 1699-1763 (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1916), p. 59; Ekberg, French Roots, p. 276; Nicolas de Finiels, An Account of
Upper Louisiana,ed. by Carl J. Ekberg and William E. Foley, transl. By Carl J. Ekberg (Columbia: University
of Missouri Press, 1989), p. 100, and n., 193.
64
Macarty to Vaudreuil, January, 1752, in Pease, Illinois on the Eve, p. 452.
65
Jelks, Ekberg, and Martin, Excavations at the Laurens Site, p. 20.
43
variety of fish, mussels, turtles, and waterfowl. Lowland forests attracted fur-bearing
terrestrial animals, such as deer, elk, opossum, raccoon, foxes, wolves, and tree squirrels –
but these species were more common in the forested uplands, and gave rise to hunting trips.
Initially, however, commons left intact on the floodplain furnished wood for fuel and small
game for consumption. A description of Cahokia commonland in the 1720’s, scattered in
various places across the Mississippi lowlands, indicates that these commons were places for
“pasturing livestock, gathering wood, and doubtless for hunting rabbits, squirrels, and prairie
chickens.”66 Clearing of the lowland scrub vegetation, such as hazel, over the course of the
nearly seventy-year French occupation gradually resulted in the park-like lands that travelers
described rhapsodically in the late eighteenth century. Hunting for meat began to require trips
up to the bluffs or across the Mississippi. The bison herds of the prairie uplands were
pursued so extensively by Indians and French that by the late 1760’s, French hunting parties
were ranging down into Kentucky. By 1814, the herds were gone.67
While the French settlers along the Mississippi became productive agriculturists, they also
adapted to a diverse and fluctuant environment. That they knew the topography and
geography of the floodplain and the upland till plain is evidenced in French place names
scattered across the American Bottom – and in their footpaths and roads. Commander
Macarty at Fort Chartres mentions “the trail in the woods du Rocher” in an account of an
Indian ambush in 1752.68 (The original letter, in French, capitalizes the name of this trail).
The same letter refers to the blufflands above the villages as “the heights.”69 Much of the
intrigue among Indian tribes, French, and British that characterizes the decades of the 1750’s
66
Ekberg, French Roots, p. 60.
George Morgan to Baynton and Wharton, Dec. 10, 1767, George Morgan Letters Book, in Alvord and Carter,
Trade & Politics, p. 132; Jelks, Ekberg, and Martin, Excavation at the Laurens Site, p. 20.
68
Macarty to Vaudreuil, January 20, 1752, in Pease, Illinois on the Eve, p. 443.
69
Ibid., p. 448.
67
44
and 1760’s takes place in geographic interaction between the heights and the floodplain. The
French used prairies for grazing and running their horses and built what Daniel Usner has
called an “exchange economy” of trade and travel to both Indian villages and across the
prairies to Vincennes on the Wabash and north to Peoria on the Illinois.70 Yet by using the
rivers running into the Mississippi from the east – the Illinois and the Kaskaskia, the Ohio
further south – as well as footpath and trail approaches down over the bluffs, the French in
the five riverine settlements along the Mississippi were mobile people. After the founding of
St. Louis in 1764, the traffic back and forth across the Mississippi increased. There had
always been river crossings between Kaskaskia and St. Genevieve in present-day Missouri, a
French community built around lead mining, salt works, and wheat. The burgeoning fur
trade center of St. Louis provided other incentives for people to cross the river. Well before
the influx of independent fur traders in the 1760’s (often described as an onslaught by
contemporary writers), the French were using their rivers in casual, opportunistic ways. In
1737, for example, a French woman from the Illinois Country, the Widow Lefevre, pushed
off in a canoe with trade merchandise, headed for the Iowa River on a fur-trading
expedition.71
Despite the evidence of a well-traveled and precisely-named environment, Canadian
French, British, and American accounts of the Illinois French consistently stress their
disinterest in “pushing out” into the open bluff country, their lack of ambition, their
unhurried, peasant world, epitomized by long, indolent summers playing cards in the
70
See Daniel J. Usner, Jr., Settlers, Indians, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower
Mississippi Valley Before 1783 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992); for a discussion of the
nature of game and Indian trails as appropriated by the French, see N.M. Miller Surrey, The Commerce, pp. 8287. Surrey has established the principal horse and footpath routes used by the French. The prairie trails, despite
being laid over buffalo traces at times wide enough for two wagons side by side, were cut so deeply into the
sod, and were so often inundated, that “not during the French period, nor for many years afterward, was it
possible to traverse this route with a cart.” The Commerce, p. 86-87.
71
Kaskaskia MS, 37:10:9:1, also cited in Briggs, The Forgotten Colony, p. 169.
45
shadows of their veranda porches.72 In 1761, for instance, a Frenchman at Kaskaskia,
Joseph Labuxierre, petitioned the commandant Neyon de Villiers for a grant of land at La
Belle Fontaine on the uplands. While the land was granted, actual French settlement there
seems never to have occurred.73 These images of the “unambitious” and “simplistic” French
help to cement a view of the inhabitants as hugging the shores of their watery world and
staying there. In fact, as evidenced especially by the Kaskaskia Manuscript records of land
sales and exchanges, as well as the notarial records of Fort Chartres, the French were mobile
and enterprising. They established extractive industries such as lead mining and saltworks;
they built windmills and grain mills. Most especially, they developed an array of specialized
river craft (“batteaux”) for fur trade and downriver trade with New Orleans; and they became
master builders, joiners, roofers, and coopers.74 Yet despite the sense of enclosure and
isolation created by the massive limestone bluffs, this busy, interknit world of surplus wheat
marketing, livestock sales, construction, and hunting was not self-sustaining. The agents to
the outside world were numerous and diverse peoples, drawn from Canadian voyageurs and
traders, at least ten Indian tribes, New Orleans merchant firms and factors, Philadelphia
merchant firms, land company scouts, frontier hunters of all nationalities, and the Catholic
priest network between French Illinois and Quebec. In the last two decades, historians have
enthusiastically explored and characterized the diverse nature of frontier zone populations,
while “new” military histories have appeared focusing on “social relations within
colonies…and placing war more realistically within this larger context of political and
72
History of Randolph, Monroe, and St. Clair Counties, p. 59.
Kaskaskia MS, 61:12:23:1.
74
Kaskaskia Manuscripts; see also Ekberg, French Roots, Appendix: Grist Mills and River Craft.
73
46
economic change.”75 The approach of this study is to continue that focus while
acknowledging the natural environment as a historical determinant in the course of empire.
Later chapters will describe the processes through which this complex, watery ecosystem
and natural trade economy were destroyed. One small incident in 1767 will illustrate conflict
in the particular environmental frontier examined here. During the British occupation,
Commander Reed fined a French woman in Kaskaskia 250 livres for selling a pint of rum in
exchange “for a piece of meat from an Indian.” The author of the letter, the agent George
Morgan writing to his employers Baynton and Wharton in Philadelphia, expresses outrage; it
is clear he considered this transaction to be normative and everyday and the fine tyrannical.
Morgan points out that the woman had not had any meat for several days.76 Why was an
Indian peddling a piece of meat normative? Why was the woman in need of meat? Why was
the fine imposed? And how did actions such as those of Colonel Reed – as well as the British
soldiers in the villages and British policies regarding settlement as a whole – introduce
artificial and disruptive constraints to the fluid upper Mississippi River frontier? Most
importantly, how did the French themselves contribute to these disruptive processes?
It is important to take into account the reality of the French Illinoisian way of life, dictated
by the watery world they inhabited and built on existing patterns of land use. The physical
environment of the Illinois Country in the last half of the eighteenth century can help to
clarify themes of conquest, adjustment, political and social upheaval, vacillating loyalties,
and relations among diverse groups of Europeans, French Creoles, and Indians. How human
beings, both French and Indians, had adapted to living in a dual world of aquatic resources
and upland prairies, affected aspects of political adjustment as diverse as religious orientation
75
76
Usner, Indians, Settlers, & Slaves, p. 219.
George Morgan Letter Book, December 6, 1767, cited in Alvord and Carter, Trade and Politics, p. 130.
47
or trade loyalty. The presence of the Spanish across the Mississippi (in possession by 1769),
the entrance of the British into the Illinois Country (1765) and the Americans (after 1778),
disturbed in specific ways the patterns of resource usage, trade, and livelihood among an
increasingly diverse population. The chaotic adjustments that make up the record of these
decades were intimately woven with the changes in the way inhabitants – the French and the
Indians – were interacting with the land on which they lived.
48
French Illinois: Patterns of Settlement: Cahokia, 1699 - 1733
In the lush, saturate lands immediately south of the Big Rivers confluence – the Illinois,
the Mississippi, and the Missouri – Cahokia and Tamaroa Indians had been living on and off
since Marquette and Joliet glided by in 1673; they had occupied the lands along the Illinois
River long before that, emigrating as Algonquian-speaking peoples from the southern
Michigan area perhaps early in the sixteenth century. This was their country, gashed with
openings of black, fertile earth and glimmering with water that ebbed and flowed in response
to both climate and the action of rivers. Many peoples, prehistoric and protohistoric, had
moved in and out of this rich, alluvial confluence area. While occupancy of the land may
have been continuous across several thousand years, it is not certain at all that one culture
gave rise to the next. Archaeologists had assumed recovered material culture would be
“linked directly” to prehistoric sites, but studies beginning in the 1980’s have found that
“rarely was it possible to establish the desired connection.”1 Both Caddoan and Siouxan
peoples may have moved through the area. The mounds of prehistoric Cahokia, counted by
Henry Brackenridge in 1811 as numbering over 150, and the immense terraced Monks
Mound rising dramatically from the floodplain, dominated the environment. Trails and paths
criss-crossed the earth as animals and peoples, at least since 1000 A.D., moved around the
earthworks. It is not clear how the mounds were used by groups of people who moved into
the Big Rivers Area after the decline of Cahokia. Many American settlers, for instance, saw
the earthworks as natural features of the land, and earlier protohistoric Indians may have
1
See Thomas E. Emerson and James A. Brown, “The Late Prehistory and Protohistory of Illinois,” in Calumet
& Fleur-de-Lys: Archaeology of Indian and French Contact in the Midcontinent (Washington: Smithsonian
Institution Press, 1992), p. 104.
49
done so as well.2 Monks Mound in particular, named for a trappist monk community
occupying it in the 1830’s, is depicted in most archaeological reconstructions as having steep
sets of steps and terraces. A strong inference is that people living in or moving through the
area would have climbed this monument. Men and women reaching the top of Monks
Mound could watch the setting sun turn pools of standing water, ponds, and the Mississippi
itself blood-red. Against such a backdrop, they watched the skies roar and tremble with
immense flocks of waterfowl – likely in the millions; in the case of migrating passenger
pigeons, the estimates are in the billions.
Much has been written of the sky-darkening migrations of the extinct passenger pigeon,
Ectopistes migratorius. Larger than mourning doves, slate gray with cherry-red breasts, these
birds settled into trees along the Mississippi in such numbers that they snapped off limbs and
bowed saplings to the ground. They provided food for hundreds of species of life along the
river: their eggs, droppings, carcasses, and live bodies fed a range of organisms from
voracious soil bacterias to humans. Archaeological work at the Modoc Rock Shelter in the
American Bottom has established that prehistoric Indians simply clubbed sleeping pigeons
out of the trees at night, where they thudded thickly to earth.3 Passenger pigeon migration
was directly linked to bountiful acorn harvests. In 1737, the botanist John Bartram noted,
2
See Robert L. Hall’s discussion of Cahokia earthworks, “The Cahokia Site and Its People,” in Hero, Hawk,
and Open Hand: American Indian Art of the Ancient Midwest and South, Robert F. Townshend, editor (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). The origin and decline of Cahokia moundbuilder civilization continue to
be of high interest to scholars. Robert L. Hall has argued elsewhere that “...the post-Mississippian decline in the
north Mississippi valley was not so much a cultural death as a transition to a mode of adaptation allowing
settlements in new areas of the prairies.” See Hall, Archaeology of the Soul: North American Indian Belief and
Ritual (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), p. 153. Other good overviews of the prehistoric-historic
puzzle arising from Cahokia culture include Thomas E. Emerson, Cahokia and the Archaeology of Power
(Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1997), especially Chapter 3, “The Cultural-Historical Contexts.”
See also the essays by Robert L. Hall, “Cahokia Identity and Interaction Models of Cahokian Mississippian, “
and R. Barry Lewis, “The Early Mississippian Period in the Confluence Region and Its Northern Relationships,
“ in Cahokia and the Hinterlands: Middle Mississippian Cultures of the Midwest, edited by Thomas E. Emerson
and R. Barry Lewis (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991).
3
See “The Hunter Returns,” Illinois: Man and Resources, Past and Present: A Guide to the Exhibits in the
Museummobile (Springfield, Illinois: Illinois State Museum, n.d.).
50
“The pigeons always frequent the most fruitfull part of the Country; there being the greatest
variety of Vegetables produced for their Support.”4 The appearance of these birds along the
Mississippi floodplain, termed a “large-scale phenomenon” covering hundreds of thousands
of acres, would have affected the environment – its “patch dynamics, nutrient status, and
habitat diversity.” One naturalist believes the birds altered light regimens and microclimates
wherever they settled in to feed.5
Similar bounty would have been present in the Cahokia area: there, waterfowl replenished
the earth and its life forms. While the numbers and variety of waterbirds in the eighteenth
century cannot be accurately assessed, the migration and mobility of many life forms,
including human, formed a complex, interactive ecosystem. Cahokia-Tamaroa Indians were
included in these natural processes as hunters and gatherers. However, they were also
activists. Their maize farming techniques, a keenly selective agriculture, had already
changed the earth of the floodplain. These protohistoric Indians were a mobile people, using
the rivers and tributaries to reach hunting areas or to visit; the Cahokia, for example, often
visited the Peoria along the Illinois River. Indians also decamped and moved up to the
blufftop prairies on seasonal hunts. The availability of myriad waterways and superior,
straight-trunked walnut and cottonwood for dugouts insured travel. It was not only the lower
Mississippi bayou country that gave rise to aquatic cultures. The inland waterways of the
middle Mississippi Valley created a moving human panoply, a rich social network whose
true scope is perhaps yet unrealized. From as early as 800 A.D., Woodland Indians were
migrating seasonally. Archaeology of early sites in west-central Illinois, for example, has
shown abandonment of farm sites that “coincide with the peak periods of waterfowl
4
John Bartram, cited in Chuck Williams, “Lessons from Pigeon,” Natural Areas Journal, Vol. 22 (3), 2002, p.
179.
5
Chuck Williams, “Lessons from Pigeon,” p. 179.
51
migrations.”6 The numbers of waterfowl on the Cahokia grant, long attracted by aquatic
plants in a saturated earth, helped to determine the experience of the first French settlers in
the floodplain area. Cahokia Indian spiritual fidelity to waterfowl, as well as the problems
created by wet soils, shaped the settlement narrative here.
The lives of prehistoric and historic Indians were filled with coming and going, and that
habit persisted after the arrival of the French in 1699. While the Cahokia readily adapted
some European practices, especially the raising of hogs and the use of iron farming
implements, their relations with the Seminarian missionaries on the Cahokia grant remained
tense. Agriculture developed very slowly here; the Indians had no economic role as
provisioners of Europeans, and the French themselves did not settle the area as the early
missionaries had anticipated. Uneven ratios of people, Europeans to Indians, and a lackluster
farming record, created a climate of dissatisfaction. The wet, marshy earth – more wet, more
marshy than the bottomlands farther south – can be accounted a major factor in the early
settlement history of the confluence area. Cahokia was a wet place. While the extensive
agriculture of the moundbuilders may have created firmer earth during their tenure, by the
time the French arrived one hundred and fifty years later, the streams, creeks, rigolets, and
marshes were brimming.
In 1698-99, French Catholic missionaries descended the Illinois River into the area known
today in Illinois as Big Rivers. The waters of the Mississippi, the Illinois, and the Missouri
meet in a commingling of colors and flow rates. Pouring into the Mississippi from the west
and east are rivers that redefine its character right at this point, where the Missouri churns a
6
Patrick J. Munson, Paul W, Parmalee, and Richard A. Yarnell, “Subsistence Ecology of Scovill, a Terminal
Middle Woodland Village,” American Antiquity, Vol. 36 (4), 1971, p. 430.
52
muddy froth.
Father Zenobius Membre, a member of La Salle’s expedition, created this
most succinct word picture in 1682: “Six leagues lower down, [we] found the Ozage River
[the Missouri], coming in from the west. It is full as large as the River Colbert [the
Mississippi] into which it empties troubling it so...but pours in so much mud that, from its
mouth the water of the great river, whose bed is also slimy, is more like clear mud than river
water.”7 In contrast, the Illinois River is usually described in first-impression accounts as
calm or peaceful. Macoupin Creek, descending from the east across present-day Macoupin,
Jersey, and Greene Counties, is the largest tributary into the Illinois in the region; farther
down the western border of the state, Piasa Creek empties into the Mississippi above presentday Alton. This major confluence area saw continuous human occupation for at least eight
thousand years. Archaeologists have found that consistently, the faunal and floral remains
excavated from the (prehistoric) Mississippian Indian sites here are aquatic.8 The rivers were
feeding the people.
The Big Rivers area also includes the north end of the American Bottom where the
Cahokia and Tamaroa tribes lived and where the French Seminarians established their first
mission. 9 Naturalists today describe this part of the Illinois Country as a mosaic of rivers,
bottoms, bluffs, broken lands and plains.10
The Cahokia area is located to the south only
about thirty miles and still part of the region. Descriptions of the land here by journeying
French in the late seventeenth century characterize it as lush, variegated, and filled with
water – “the valley between...a Marshey Ground.” In 1698 such observers as Louis
7
Zenobius Membre, collected in J.G. Shea, Discovery and Exploration of the Mississippi Valley (New York:
J.S. Redfield, 1852), cited in John White, Big Rivers Area Assessment: Early Accounts of the Ecology of the Big
Rivers Area, Vol. 5 (Springfield: Illinois Department of Natural Resources, 2000), p. 16.
8
Charles J. Bareis and James W. Porter, American Bottom Archaeology: A summary of the FAI-270 Project
Contribution to the Culture History of the Mississippi River Valley (Urbana; University of Illinois Press, 1984),
p. 185.
9
John White, Big Rivers, p. 1.
10
John White, Big Rivers, p. ix.
53
Hennepin and St. Cosme found striking land forms, “ridges of mountains,” and great
meadows “cover’d with an infinite number of wild Bulls [bison].”11 St. Cosme, arriving with
the first party of Seminarian missionaries, wrote of the Illinois River: “During that time we
had an abundance of provisions for no one need fast on that river so great is the quantity of
game of all kinds: Swans, Bustards [geese], Ducks.”12 It is significant that St. Cosme speaks
of “that time.” It was winter on the Illinois River below Peoria: the waters were plated with
ice. The bark canoes used by the party were too fragile to withstand the capricious movement
of sharp, jagged floes, and so they waited out the freezing weeks. Yet “during that time”
swans, geese, and ducks flocked in abundance on the Illinois. Through such suggestive
clues, the slight, offhand words of a missionary in 1698, the Big Rivers area emerges as a
country of birds.
It is the presence of swans especially which reveals the intensity of birds, especially
waterfowl. Illinois has lost resident populations of trumpeter swans, Cygnus buccinator,
extirpated from the state by the 1880’s. But swans have an ancient history in the Illinois
Country. Trumpeters “likely wintered casually on the major rivers of southern Illinois.”13
Swan bones have been found in archaeological digs at Cahokia, as many as 375 specimens,
and along the Fox River, they show up in layers dating from the Pleistocene.14 Mature
trumpeter swans have a wingspread of eight to ten feet. Thus a single wing would have
perhaps been just slightly less tall than the average Indian man. Trumpeters are heavy,
snow-white birds whose call sounds like the note of a French horn. In their slow, ungainly
11
Louis Hennepin and R.G. Thwaites, editor A New Discovery of a Vast Country in America (Chicago: A.C.
McClurg & Co., 1903), cited in John White, Big Rivers, p. 23-24.
12
Jean Francoise Busson de St. Cosme, in M.M. Quaife, editor, The Development of Chicago, 1674-1914
(Chicago: Caxton Club, 1916), cited in John White, Big Rivers, p. 27.
13
H. David Bolen, The Birds of Illinois (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), p. 20.
14
Ibid.
54
lift-offs, their wings ply and churn the surface of the water; they fly among the slowest of any
of the North American waterfowl.15 A flock of “wing-loading” trumpeter swans ascending to
flight on the Illinois River would be no insignificant event; and those swans were intermixed
with snow geese, Canada geese, migrant grebes of several varieties, bitterns, herons, egrets,
wood ducks, teal, mallards, wigeons, pintails and cranes. Each bird has a distinctive call; en
masse they would have produced a cacophony, particularly in the areas of the Illinois River
where immense, rocky bluffs trap and magnify sound. Not all of these water birds were
resident in the winter in the Big Rivers area; some were summer breeders or merely passersthrough. But the Mississippi River is one of the great fly-ways of the world. As late as the
year 1955, “after [at least] 75 years of intensive hunting and drastic destruction of habitat,”
observers counted as many as six million mallards alone in the Illinois River migratory
corridor.16 And just as ethnohistorical studies of the eastern and northern Woodland Indians
have linked their spiritual and self-created identities to fur-bearing animals, what little is
known about Illinois Indian tribes links them to this kingdom of birds.17
The journal of the Frenchman Deliette who encountered and lived among the Peoria before
1700 (and continued as a resident trader in the area well past 1700) is the single most
authoritative source on the Illinois Indians.18 Most of what is known about these tribes as
they were living when they met the French comes from a period of time between 1673 and
1700. Such information describes the Peoria and the Kaskaskia, dwelling then on the
northern Illinois River at the Mission of the Immaculate Conception (Starved Rock). For
15
Paul A. Johnsgard, Waterfowl of North America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975), p. 12.
Patrick J. Munson, et al, “Subsistence Ecology,” p. 415.
17
On woodland and subarctic Indian identification with fur-bearing mammals, see Calvin Martin, Keepers of
the Game: Indian-Animal Relations and the Fur Trade (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978).
18
For a good sketch of Deliette, see Judith A. Franke, French Peoria and the Illinois Country 1673-1846
(Springfield, Illinois: Illinois State Museum Society, 1995), p. 28-31.
16
55
smaller tribes such as the Cahokia, Tamaroa, and the Mechigamea, very little is known at all.
Because these five tribes had become the dominant members of the Illinois Confederacy,
however, and especially because of the geographic proximity of the Cahokia and Peoria, it is
possible to use accounts of the Peoria as careful representations.19
The Peoria and
Kaskaskia lived in seasonal subsistence patterns. Winter and summer hunts were separated
by a spring planting season beginning in March, when maize was hilled in previously readied
plots. Observers noticed that the women prepared to plant corn by first gathering firewood,
as they would not have time or energy to undertake this once they began to work in the
fields.20 The verb in use here, “gathering,” stems directly from the anthropological usage of
“hunter-gatherer,” and unfortunately, can imply that women walked around the land picking
up limbs, small branches, and twigs. Such ease of gathering can only occur in areas heavily
timbered with a thriving understory of young trees and brushy growth. However, the habitat
of the American Bottom was managed by fire. Annual burning off of the underbrush and
small tree growth – usually in the autumn – directly shaped the many tallgrass prairies so in
evidence when the French arrived.21
Some evidence exists about the difficulty of obtaining firewood. In 1698 one of the
engages hired to accompany the Seminarians down to the Cahokia area, M. De la Source,
observed of the Tamaroa tribe encamped at the Cahokia area: “There are as many people at
the Tamarois as at Kebeq.” At the time there were about 300 Tamaroa cabins. Later in the
same year, St. Cosme observed that the Tamaroa had moved to an island in the Mississippi
19
Charles Callender, “Illinois,” in William C. Sturtevant, Handbook of North American Indians (Washington:
Smithsonian Institution, 1978), p. 674.
20
Callender, “Illinois,” in The Handbook, p. 674.
21
See discussion of a fire-managed environment in Chapter One.
56
“to get wood more easily....”22 The initial populations of the five Illinois tribes at the time of
French settlement in 1700 range from estimates of 5400 people up at Peoria to 2000 people
at the Cahokia-Tamaroa village. Historians estimating the numbers of people in Indian
villages use the formula of 20 people to a cabin, based on estimates that four warriors lived in
each cabin, and that each warrior would represent a family population of five individuals.23
The Indian settlement with the same number of people “as at Kebeq” would require
considerable outlays of firewood. Even at one fire per cabin or lodge, the need for wood fuel
would have been high. Some archaeologists have estimated that early housing practices of
the Illinois Indians may have included “large cabins of the vaulted [roof] type” erected on
low mounds (two feet high) to avoid ground flooding. These larger cabins had four fires,
“with one or two families at a fire.”24 Given the numbers of fires to supply, Indian women
may well have had to use axes to chop off limbs and fell smaller trees such as mulberry. In
1678, Deliette described Peoria women “...run[ning], each with an axe, into the woods to cut
poles and peel bark for their summer hunting cabins.”25
By 1691, however, the Peoria had
relocated down the Illinois River from Starved Rock to Lake Pimeteoui due to “depletion of
firewood in the area.”26 The Seminarian priests mentioned the usefulness of the heavilyforested islands in the Mississippi. Father Mercier described the Island of the Holy Family as
being “completely covered with a forest of full-grown trees, good for building purposes and
22
Letters of M. De la Source and St. Cosme, both cited in J.H. Schlarman, From Quebec to New Orleans: the
Story of the French in America (Belleville, Illinois: Beuchler Publishing Company, 1929), p. 141.
23
See Joseph Zitomersky, French Americans-Native Americans in Eighteenth-Century French Colonial
Louisiana: The Population Geography of the Illinois Indians, 1670s –1760’s (Sweden: Lund University Press,
1994), p. 203; for formulas on estimating populations, see p. 219.
24
Thorne Deuel, American Indian Ways of Life: An Interpretation of the Archaeology of Illinois and Adjoining
Areas (Springfield, Illinois: Illinois State Museum, 1958), p. 46
25
Pierre Deliette, “De Gannes Memoir,” p. 308.
26
Charles Callender, “Illinois,” in Sturtevant, Handbook, p. 678.
57
firewood, especially a great deal of poplar, few walnut-trees, and mulberry-trees....”27 The
prize heating wood, evidenced by ash pit remains, was hickory. But hickory and oak are not
consistent floodplain varieties; in general, they like sunny, open, and well-drained upland
soils. Seminarian letters from the Cahokia grant in the early 1730’s indicate the priests were
hauling white oak from the top of the bluffs.28 Like the Indian tribes who had long utilized
the three-part geography of the American Bottom lands, the French eventually learned to take
wood from the mature trees of the upland till plain.
After gathering firewood, the Illinois Indian women planted maize, beans, squash and
melons (melon was an introduced plant, observed by Deliette among the Peoria as early as
167829). The hunts for buffalo were launched from camps set up on the edges of the prairie,
right at the timber margin, or along streams and rivers. In winter, Indians erected portable
sapling-frame lodges covered in woven cattail mats. Winter camps tended to be tightly
clustered, perhaps for warmth. The only known winter camp site of the Illinois to be
excavated archaeologically is along the Illinois River near Naples – Woman Chief’s Camp.
Ash pits at this camp have yielded carbonized hickory bark; faunal remains recovered were
“elements from bison, cottontail, beaver, muskrat, domestic dog, black bear, raccoon, whitetailed deer, turkey, waterfowl, turtle, fish, and mussels.” Floral remains were “hickory, little
barley, maize, and common bean.”30 A second pit excavated and carbon-dated to a
somewhat later time period, possibly 1706 (after the French Cahokia settlement) includes
27
Fathers Mercier and Courier, April 12, 1735, cited in Schlarman, From Quebec, p. 282.
See Letter from Father Mercier, April 12, 1735, op.cit. Schlarman, From Quebec, p. 283.
29
Pierre Deliette, “De Gannes Memoir,” p. 345; see also Marquette’s references (1673-77) to melons “which
are excellent, especially those which have red seeds,” in the Memorial, “Of the Character of the Illinois, of their
Habits and Customs,” in Thwaites, Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, Vol. 59 (Cleveland: The Burrows
Bros. Company, 1900), p. 129.
30
John A. Walthall, F. Terry Norris, and Barbara D. Stafford, “Woman Chief’s Village: An Illini Winter
Hunting Camp,” in Calumet & Fleur de Lys: Archaeology of Indian and French Contact in the Midcontinent
(Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992), p. 137.
28
58
among the faunal remains evidence of pig.31 While at summer and winter camps, Illinois
Indians hunted initially on foot, organizing communally. They surrounded a herd and drove
the buffalo into ambush where the rest of the hunting party waited. Deliette, who recorded
these details, participated in a summer hunt in which 1,200 buffalo were killed, as well as
“deer, bears, turkeys, lynxes, and mountain lions.”32 This number of animals was taken over
a period of approximately five weeks. While 1,200 buffalo seems high for humans hunting
on foot, Deliette also records that on a single hunting day, Indians killed 120 animals, culling
them from a “great herd” and running them down. The hunters used both firearms and bow
and arrow on this hunt; Deliette states they shot off “an extraordinary number of arrows,”
after which “a great number of buffalo remained on the ground.” 33 In the period of time
before the Illinois Indians obtained horses, they relied on their speed on foot. Baron La
Hontan, writing a “Discourse on the Savages of North America” in 1689 observed, “The
Illinese, the Oumamis, and the Outagamins: with some adjacent nations are of an indifferent
size, and run like Greyhounds...presuming that in case of a discovery, they can easily save
themselves by their good Heels.”34 Deliette also admired the Illinois as being “trained
runners” and described them, too, as having “lynx-eyes.”35
Summer villages of the Illinois were “strung out” along the river banks and could
contain many lodges; observers have counted 300 to 351 at different times before 1700.
Summer lodges were covered with lighter bark sheets (elm) to admit air and light. Yet
before either summer or winter camps were set up, Illinois Indians launched a month of
31
Ibid.
Pierre Deliette, “De Gannes Memoir,” p. 312.
33
Ibid., p. 311.
34
La Hontan, New Voyages to North America, Vol. II, 4 and 77, cited in J. Nick Perrin, Perrin’s History of
Illinois (1906), p. 45.
35
Pierre Deliette, “De Gannes Memoir,” p. 319.
32
59
raiding and warfare in February. It is here, in their warfare rituals, that the connection with
the immense natural bird population of the Mississippi floodplain can be found. Birds were
part of the rituals of war; the Illinois “emphasized birds as the emblems of supernatural
power.”36 Warriors chose a personal bird or birds and collected their skins in a “colored reed
mat.”37 Before departing for the raid, warriors participated in night-long rituals in which the
birdskins were displayed. This was to ensure the cooperation and aid of their personal bird
spirits. Deliette mentions the warriors “pay[ing] homage, according to their custom, to their
birds.”38 Later, during the raid itself, “...warriors gave the cries of their birds.” Captives
brought back to the Illinois camps sang their death chants while holding long sticks
“containing the feathers of birds killed by the raiders.”39 Thus the metaphor of the bird of
prey was woven into the chronology of war raids.
Descriptions of Illinois Indians by modern writers employ the terms “semipermanent
villages,” “seminomadic lifestyle,” or “subsistence based on farming, hunting, and
gathering.” The circannual rhythms of these Indians involved a coming and going between
river bottom summer camps, upland winter camps, bison herds roaming on the larger prairies
further inland, enemy Indian camps to the north and south, as well as across the Mississippi
into the lands of the Missouri and Osage. The Mechigamea “continuously journeyed” as far
down the Mississippi as Arkansas and the Quapaw tribes.40 The world of the Illinois Indians,
before the French arrived and during the French occupation, was a traveling world. In a 1750
letter written by Father Vivier at the Kaskaskia mission, he states that the Kaskaskia were
continuing to hunt seasonally. “From the beginning of October to the middle of March, they
36
Callender, “Illinois,” in The Handbook, p. 676.
For a description of the making of these dyed reed mats, see Pierre Deliette, “De Gannes Memoir,” p. 375.
38
Pierre Deliette, “De Gannes Memoir,” p. 376.
39
Charles Callender, “Illinois,” in Sturtevant, Handbook, p. 676-677.
40
John A. Walthall, “Aboriginal Pottery and the Eighteenth-Century Illini,” in Calumet & Fleur-de-Lys, p. 170.
37
60
hunt at a distance of forty to fifty leagues from their village; and, in the middle of March,
they return to their village. Then the women sow the maize.”41 In 1750, the Kaskaskia had
been living in a permanent village near the French for almost thirty years. They had learned
to use the French plow, the charrue, and were considered to be the most highly Christianized
of any of the Indian tribes.42 Yet they still kept to the rhythms of their hunts; they still
decamped in masse. Despite the five French settlements devoted to agriculture, lead mining,
and milling, the traditions of the Illinois Indians and trade relations among tribes and with the
French and British created a highly mobile environment. The movement of people across the
American Bottom was continuous. In their subsistence patterns, Indians occupying the
American Bottom were migrants and summer/winter residents themselves. They were part of
a diverse ecosystem dominated by prodigious numbers of migrating and resident waterfowl.
The topography of this area was also highly attractive to scavengers and birds of prey like the
bluff-loving turkey vultures, river-loving bald eagles, red-shouldered and red-tailed hawks,
and many species of owls. It is not too remarkable that birds should have become spiritually
important to the Indians who lived and moved with them.
Into this structured world built around migratory patterns arrived a group of Jesuit and
Seminarian Catholic missionaries. They found an animistic cosmology based on the reading
of extremely specific, unmistakable, and dependable signs and codes from the natural world;
Catholic missionaries sought to replace this with a hierarchical faith in which the concepts of
41
Letter from Father Vivier, 1750, cited in Walthall, “Aboriginal Pottery,” p. 161.
See letter from Andre Penicaut discussing the Kaskaskian use of plows as early as 1711, in Relation de
Penicaut in P. Margry, Memoires et Documents, V, 448-493.
42
61
“the unknown” and “the unknowable” reigned supreme.43 Perhaps the least-explored aspect
of Catholic conversion efforts among American Indians has to do with the role of knowledge,
not belief, in both Indian religions and Catholic Christianity. Yet the story of the French
missionaries in the Illinois Country is not only about religion, about the introduction of an
alien theology; it is also about property. Property came to play a central role in the French
Catholic penetration into Indian lands. Jesuit and Seminarian possessions, whether sacred or
secular, were sources of keen interest to Indians. More than movable property, however,
mission lands came to stand as symbols for French presence. The presence was permanent
and agricultural as well as spiritual. Catholic missionaries to the Illinois Country –
Seminarian as well as Jesuit – methodically developed and improved their holdings as
corollary activities to converting the Illinois Indian tribes. Research has established that it
was at the southernmost colony of Kaskaskia that a donne on a Jesuit mission first cultivated
wheat in 1718.44 Sixty miles north in Cahokia, the Seminarians developed an extensive
grant; their letters reveal excited plans for the establishment of grist mills, water mills, forts,
and farms for incoming Canadian settlers. The letters of the Jesuit missionaries and of the
Seminarians over time, from 1699 through to the Seven Years War, reveal a shift away from
the priority of converting Indians to the priority of establishing French colonies with
centrally-located chapels and churches and enough priests to minister to French souls. Of
the five French settlements on the Mississippi, two are particularly instructive as case studies.
Cahokia, settled in 1699, and the village of Chartres, growing up in the prairie next to Fort
43
Carolyn Merchant has explored the conflicts, congruencies, and changes in Indian and settler belief systems
and relations to nature in Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender, and Science in New England (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1989).
44
See Carl J. Ekberg’s discussion of wheat in the Illinois Country, in French Roots in the Illinois Country: The
Mississippi Frontier in Colonial Times (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), p. 173; Mary Borgias Palm
also overviews French wheat in “The First Illinois Wheat,” Mid-America 13 (July 1930), p. 72-73.
62
Chartres, offer avenues for comparative analysis that can trace differing profiles of land and
resource usage and hence, different patterns of interaction with Indian tribes as well.
The natural and human environments of these two settlements determined trajectories of
settlement growth. It has been all too easy to lump the French settlements together; they
were different. In Cahokia, the river bluffs ran to the northeast fifty arpents (about one and a
half miles) away from the settlement residences, and the French concession meandered
across sixteen square leagues of soggy land occupied intermittently by Cahokia, Tamaroa,
and Peoria Indians. The river bluffs on the Cahokia grant are not uniformly “clifty” – that is,
there are gentle, intermittent slopes towards the higher ridge ground. Access to the Cahokia
concession from the upland till plain is easier and likely facilitated human traffic. In
addition, the Cahokia grant contained the great Cahokia mounds, a land form entirely
anthropogenic (humanly-derived); the mounds distinguish the Cahokia lands from all other
French grants along the Mississippi. At Chartres, severe, vertical bluffs protected the village
within walking distance; French and Indian settlement and interaction took place in a
sheltered land cove lying between the Mississippi River and the limestone bluffs, and the
only Indians living in the vicinity were a small group of “domiciled” Mechigamea (also
spelled Metchigamea or Michigamea) who occupied a village a league and a half north of the
fort.45 The contrasting development of Cahokia and Chartres is marked. At each place,
differing habitats and settling populations combined to create distinct frontier worlds,
separated by only thirty miles.
45
Dan Hechenberger, “The Metchigamea Tribe,” M’Skutewe Awandiangwi, 1(2), p. l ; Wayne Temple, Indian
Villages of the Illinois Country: Historic Tribes (Springfield, Illinois: Department of Registration and
Education, 1958), p. 41, 45-46.
63
In the Illinois Country, in the early years after the establishment of the Cahokia
mission, 1699, letters and records detail competition between the Jesuits and the Seminary of
the Foreign Missions for control of mission property and neophytes. Seminarians ended up
in Cahokia, and their experiences with Cahokia-Tamaroa Indians in an often-flooded
ecosystem stand in counterpoint to the Jesuit experiences farther south. Exceptionally large
territories in New France – and myriad Indian groups who occupied those territories – were
assigned to missionaries in proclamations as sweeping as La Salle’s 1682 claiming ceremony
on “the river Colbert” (the Mississippi). Then, on a “dry place” above the confluence of the
river and the sea (Gulf of Mexico), La Salle devised a column and a cross for implantation.
Although La Salle is often credited with being first in the claiming of land in North America,
he was only following in a long line of such rituals. Eleven years earlier, this ceremony had
also been enacted near Sault St. Marie, Michigan, on a “slight eminence.” There, the
Seigneur de Saint-Lusson erected a cross and a cedar post bearing the French coat of arms.
He lifted a piece of earth four times, shaking it dramatically in the four cardinal directions,
claiming loudly, “In the name of the Most High and Most Mighty and Most Redoubtable
Monarch Louis the Fourteenth...we take possession...Vive le Roi!” Saint-Lusson instructed
the masses of brilliantly-attired Indians from fourteen tribes to also shout “Vive le Roi!”46
La Salle’s ceremony on the lower Mississippi seems to have been quieter but much more
precise. He declaimed before the assembled French soldiers and explorers that they
...by virtue of the commission of his Majesty...have taken, and do now take...possession of
Louisiana, the seas, harbors, ports, bays, adjacent straits; and all the nations, people,
provinces, cities, towns, villages, mines, minerals, fisheries, streams, and rivers...from the
mouth of the great river St. Louis, on the eastern side, otherwise called the Ohio, Alighin,
46
Schlarman, From Quebec, p. 47. For a discussion of English, Spanish, and French claiming ceremonies and
how they differed in practice and meaning, see Patricia Seed, “Taking Possession and Reading Texts:
Establishing the Authority of Overseas Empires,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser. 49 (1992), 183-209.
64
Sipore, or Chukagone...as also along the river Colbert, or Mississippi, and rivers which
discharge themselves therein...”47
La Salle’s claim left out no possible geography or resource. The French Catholic officials in
Montreal and Paris also manipulated immense tracts of North America. Indian tribes of the
interior were viewed as comparable resources to land itself, both as potential converts to
Catholicism and as fur-gatherers for the monarchy. In the late seventeenth century, officials
in New France began issuing letters-patent for the opening of the Illinois Country. A
recounting of the arrival of Jesuits missionaries along the Mississippi River, however, must
begin with a historical error. The failure of Bishop Monsignor St. Vallier, second Bishop of
Quebec, to distinguish between land and peoples in a series of letters-patent created a
jurisdictional confusion in the Illinois Country that would still be ongoing as late as the
1790’s, when lawsuits over property rights were finally settled. In 1690, Bishop St. Vallier
gave a commission to the Jesuits to “preach the Gospel to the Ottawa, Miami, Sioux, and
Illinois Indians.” Then in 1698 he gave permission for another Catholic group, the
Seminarians of Quebec (the Seminary of Foreign Missions) to penetrate the Illinois Country
for the purpose of setting up missions on either side of the Mississippi: “en deca et au dela
du Mississippi.”48 In both cases, these grants, directly conflicting as they were, bespoke a
rather naive – or untutored – sense of the numbers of peoples and the leagues of land
involved. Between 1699 and 1703, then, both the Seminarians and the Jesuits, charged with
evangelizing the Illinois Indians, journeyed down the Illinois River past Lake Pimiteoui
(Peoria) to the lands of the Tamaroa Indians near Cahokia. Henri de Tonti, usually described
as a “soldier of fortune,” had recommended to the Bishop that the Tamaroa Indians were
47
cited in Henry Brown, The History of Illinois from Its First Discovery and Settlement to the Present Time
(New York: J. Winchester, New World Press, 1844), p. 132-133.
48
Schlarman, From Quebec, p. 131.
65
likely candidates for conversion. One of the first actions of the Seminarians was the baptism
of a son born to a French soldier, La Violette, and an Indian mother, Catherine Ekipakinoua,
with Henri de Tonti standing in as godfather. The baptism took place in La Violette’s small
cabin and was recorded in the old parish registers of the Immaculate Conception of
Kaskaskia. In November of 1698, when the cabin Mass and baptism occurred, the Kaskaskia
mission was located north of Cahokia, on the Illinois River at Fort Pimiteoui (Peoria). In a
“Memoir Concernant le Pays Illinois,” the author describes Peoria as being populated by six
of the eight Illinois nations living in two hundred and sixty cabins, with a “fighting
population” of nearly eight hundred warriors.49 The baptism of the La Violette son at the
Kaskaskia Mission introduced the Seminarians to the kinds of relationships already
flourishing in the Illinois country.
These members of the Seminaire des Missions Etrangeres, described as “a new group of
Frenchmen,” included M. Francois Jolliet de Montigny, M. Jean Francois Buisson de St.
Cosme, M. Antoin Davion, Deacon Thaumur de la Source (a donne helping the priests), and
Brother Alexander. The men were addressed as “Monsignor” rather than “Pere,” (Father) as
was the custom with Jesuit priests.50 In addition, although guided down the Illinois River to
the Cahokia site by the knowledgeable Henri de Tonti himself, it is clear that these
Seminarians were just in the process of learning about the Illinois Indians. In two important
ways, the arriving Seminarians differed from the Jesuits who also claimed the right to
mission territory in Illinois. These differences reflect powerful psychological
conceptualizations that had developed in Jesuit understanding of Indians over the nearly
49
Mary Borgias Palm, The Jesuit Missions of the Illinois Country 1673-1763 (Cleveland, Ohio: Saint Louis
University, 1931), pp. 24 and 80-81.
50
Dan Hechenberger, “Towards Understanding the Illinewek View of the French at Cahokia,” Journal of the St.
Clair County Historical Society 5 (9), p. 15, 39.
66
seventy years they had been laboring in North America. The differences also shaped patterns
of Jesuit-Indian interaction in the Illinois Country.
The first difference is linguistic. None of the Seminarians spoke any of the Illinewek
Algonquin language, used by all the tribes. These tribes originally numbered as many as
seventeen and included the five most consistently appearing in French-Indian relations of the
eighteenth century: the Peoria, Kaskaskia, Cahokia, Tamaroa, and Mechigamea. Father
Marest would describe the Seminarians, using the term “gentlemen”: “As these Gentlemen
did not know the Illinois language, we gave them a collection of prayers, and the translation
of the catechism....”51 Those prayers were the result of months and years of painstaking
work by Father Allouez at the Eastern Great Lakes missions in the seventeenth century.
Father Allouez was unusually gifted and persevering in gathering and recording Algonquin,
but he also typifies the Jesuit commitment to learning Native languages. The Jesuits had
early seen that their own training in classical languages and conversion rhetoric made their
learning Indian tongues much more “efficient” than teaching Indians French as a means to
introduce Catholic Christianity.52 This policy of learning Indian languages differs from
earlier efforts of the Recollect friars before 1620, who thought that Indians should be forced
to learn French; predictably, this policy resulted in very little lasting transmission of
Christianity.53 Many Jesuit fathers produced long word lists, grammars, initial AlgonquianFrench dictionaries, hymnals and prayer books. Father Gravier, who lived and worked
among the Kaskaskian Illinois in the 1690’s, compiled a hand-written dictionary of
51
Reuben Gold Thwaites, editor, Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, Vol. 65 (Cleveland: The Burrows
Brothers Company, 1900) p. 85. See also Hechenberger’s discussion, “Towards an Illinewek,” p. 22.
52
See the excellent discussion of Jesuit linguistic efforts in Tracy Leavelle, ““Bad Things” and “Good Hearts”:
Mediation, Meaning, and the Language of Illinois Christianity,” forthcoming.
53
Bruce G. Trigger, Natives and Newcomers: Canada’s “Heroic Age” Reconsidered (Kingston and Montreal:
McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1985), p. 201.
67
thousands of words. His fellow priest, Father Marest, was able to learn Illini Algonquin after
only four or five months of rigorous study. However, some Jesuits found the Indian
languages exceptionally difficult. In 1723, Father Sebastien Rasles (Rale), posted to the
Illinois Country, wrote an extensive account of his language struggles. Rale had striven to
learn Huron, for he found that when a person understood Huron, “he [could] in less than
three months make himself understood by the five Illinois tribes.” Huron was “the most
majestic, and at the same time, the most difficult, of all Savage tongues.” Rale used a
grammar composed by Father Chaumont but felt that “a Missionary is fortunate if he can,
even with this aid, express himself elegantly in that language after ten years of constant
study.”54
Facility in the Illini languages was connected intimately with a second important principle
of Jesuit work: constant presence among the tribes, even to the point of accompanying them
on winter hunts, trading trips, and difficult journeys from village to village across the
prairies. This peripatetic commitment demonstrates certain reversals in Jesuit policy
regarding clerical proximity to Indians. Although they may have initially conceived of
permanent missions, early Jesuits began to accompany Indians on travels as part of their
conversion strategy. In a mid-seventeenth century document forming part of the Jesuit
Relations, “Instructions to Fathers who are to be sent among the Hurons,” priests were told,
“Be quick to take your place in the canoe, to disembark with haste and to draw up your habit
to prevent it becoming wet.” Missionaries shared Indian cabins or crude shelters at night,
suffering from scorched feet and smoke inhalation. These early accounts are full of
references to hunger. Sometimes priests were forced to chew old mooseskins for sustenance.
54
Tracy Leavelle, “Bad Things and “Good Hearts”; letter from Father Sebastien Rasles, October 12, 1723, in
The Indians of North America, ed. by Edna Kenton, from “The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents,” Vol.
Two (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & Company, 1927), pp. 364-365.
68
Father Rale described his hunger as “the most cruel torture,” and mentioned the only
resource in times of lack of game: “a sort of leaf which the savages call Kenghessanach and
the French Tripes des Roches... [like] chervil, of which they have the shape except that they
are much larger. They are served either boiled or roasted; in this latter manner I have eaten
them, and they are less distasteful than in the former.”55 Priests took with them a bag which
contained articles for the Holy Communion, but also, an assortment of small gift items:
needles, fishhooks, glass trinkets. Instructions to these early priests stressed the
“embellishment” of religious ceremonies. Priests were to use decorations like “leaves,
bouquets, garlands, and brightly-colored materials” to attract Indian eyes and keep them
interested.56
Gradually, for a variety of reasons, Jesuits laboring in New France set up permanent
mission complexes and ventured out to nearby villages on short trips to preach, evangelize,
and minister. Jesuits felt that they could make more progress with Huron converts by
encouraging them to remain isolated from other French, especially coureur du bois, whose
lives were rife with the two excesses most detested by priests: drink and licentiousness.
Teams of preaching missionaries fanned out from the mission into nearby native towns.
Jesuits continued to maintain their policy of “keep[ing] the Indians separate from the French
and teaching them in their own language.”57 When the fur trade pushed west into the upper
Mississippi Valley, the Jesuits followed the furs. And they brought with them an ingrained
idea about permanent mission settlements attracting “domiciled” Indians who would live
near to but separate from the French.
55
Raymond Douville and Jacques Casanova, Daily Life in Early Canada, translated by Carola Congreve (New
York: The MacMillan Company, 1968), p. 108-109; letter from Father Sebastien Rasles, in The Indians, p. 370.
56
Douville and Casanova, Early Life, p. 111.
57
Trigger, Natives, p. 293; see also discussion in Palm, Jesuit Missions, p. 96.
69
The Illinois Country, though, would challenge these conceptions in dramatic ways: its
sheer size, its daunting remoteness. By the time the Jesuits and Seminarians left Canada,
missions clustered along the St. Lawrence, where there had been Jesuit activity for almost
seventy years. Resident priests and Seminarians were used to Indian villages on either side
of the “great river road,” and they comfortably traveled the settlement chain of Tadoussac,
Quebec, Trois Rivieres, and Ville-Marie (Montreal). This geographic clustering and
tightness of human settlement, both Indian and French, fostered the kind of mission life
Jesuits had learned to believe was effective. A map prepared by the Illinois organization
Nipundikan clearly shows the difference in size and population density between the St.
Lawrence area and the sweep of land to the west. Here lay immense, variegated land, a rich
mosaic of tallgrass prairie, riparian forest, blufflands, ravines, and barrens. This variety
spanned the North American continent between Fort Pontchartrain (Detroit), built in 1701,
and the southernmost (transient) settlement in the Illinois Country, the Juchereau Tannery
established between 1702 and 1705 near the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers.
When in 1699 the French priests sailed down the Illinois River past the late seventeenthcentury fort of Pimiteoui (and also past short-lived forts such as St. Louis and Crevecouer),
there were no French settlements or missions; an assortment of Illinois tribes – perhaps as
many as eight distinct nations – lived and roamed along the Illinois, Mississippi, and
Kaskaskia Rivers. Above Pimiteoui (Peoria) lived the Fox, Sauk, and Potawatomi; to the
east lived Kickapoo and Miami Indians such as the Wea and Piankeshaw. The Jesuits soon
realized that the Illinois Country would demand of them an intense mobility. As late as the
1780, letters from the Jesuit Pierre Gibault discuss the exhaustive demands of his traveling,
although Gibault was covering territory to minister to French inhabitants by that time. The
70
theme of distance is instinct in the Jesuit letters from the Illinois Country. Nicolas de Finiels,
who explored Upper Louisiana in the late 1790’s, wrote about the travels from Quebec and
Montreal of traders and priests: “You must comprehend the geography of North America to
comprehend such a journey.”58
In 1712, Father Gabriel Marest, writing from the (relocated) Kaskaskia Mission, sent an
extensive account to Father Barthelemi Germon, a professor at Orleans, France. This letter is
not only about the country, Indian groups, missions, spiritual ministries, problems and
procedures in conversion activities; it is also Father Marest’s testament to the Jesuit
missionary’s exhausting and painful peripatetic life. The extremes of distance and weather,
the physical punishment inflicted on toiling, dedicated missionaries, and their looping trips
across prairies, down spring-flooded rivers and up ice-bound rivers – such accounts stand
forth conspicuously. “These journeys which we are compelled to take from time to time –
either to follow the Savages, or for other reasons important to the well-being of our Missions
–are extremely difficult.”59 Marest describes the death of Father Binneteau, who had gone on
the summer hunt with the Illinois Indians (“our Savages,”). Father Binneteau struggled
through intense July heat, “sometimes ...in danger of smothering amid the grass, which was
extremely high; sometimes he suffered extremely from thirst...these hardships brought upon
him a violent sickness, from which he expired in my arms.”60 In the same letter is an account
of the death of Father Bergier at the Tamaroa Mission. Father Bergier expired suddenly
from a lingering fever. As soon as he was dead, his enemies, the Indian charlatans (medicine
men), gathered around the cross he had erected, dancing and breaking the cross “into a
58
Nicolas de Finiels, An Account of Upper Louisiana, ed. by Carl J. Ekberg and William E. Foley, transl. by
Carl J. Ekberg (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1989), p. 99
59
See Marest letter, 1712, Jesuit Relations, Vol. 65, p. 253.
60
Ibid.
71
thousand pieces.” Father Marest describes the Tamaroa Mission as follows: “About twentyfive leagues from here [the mission on the Kaskaskia River, established in 1703] is the
village of the Tamarouas. This is a mission which was first entrusted to Father Pinet...this
Father had as his successor Monsieur Bergier, a Priest from the Seminary of the Missions
etrangeres.”61 Thus priests from the Jesuit Order and the Quebec Seminary were serving the
needs of the Tamaroa Mission, speaking in both French and Algonquian. Yet it is clearly the
Jesuits who are traveling, embarking on lengthy and life-threatening trips down the
Mississippi in pirogues or northward across the prairies on ancient trails. An account of the
Holy Family Mission at Cahokia stresses the permanency of the Seminarians there: “There is
no reason to suppose that the site of the mission was ever shifted. The present old mission
church of the Holy Family, Cahokia, built in 1775, certainly stands on the site of the mission
of 1737. And the church of 1737, with the same certainty, stood on the site of the Tamarois
village and first mission church of 1699.”62
This description of the permanency of the Cahokia mission stands in counterpoint to all
other French missions and churches in the Illinois Country. At the French villages of St.
Philippe, Prairie du Rocher, Chartres, and Kaskaskia, the Jesuit churches disintegrated, were
moved, rebuilt, were occupied by farm animals, stood roofless, and became barracks for
British soldiers and then Virginian (American) despots. Even the 1735 satellite mission
established by the Seminarians at the River L’Abbe, headed by Father Mercier, was
abandoned in 1752 as the Cahokia Indians fled south, away from Fox attacks. The stability
of the Holy Family Mission at Cahokia can perhaps be explained by the work of the
Seminarians, who stayed put, preferring to minister to the incoming French settlers who
61
62
Op. Cit., 257.
Schlarman, From Quebec to New Orleans, p. 141.
72
began to arrive and till land around the mission sites. In 1702, the General of the Jesuits, in
concert with the French monarchy and a host of consulting bishops, directed the Jesuits at the
Cahokia Mission to give up their claim to the area in favor of the Seminarians. Father Pinet
then left and crossed the Mississippi River to the re-located Kaskaskia Mission, joining two
other Jesuit priests in their work there.63 The Seminarians stayed on. By the 1720’s, “Holy
Family Mission/Parish became permanently associated with the Cahokia, who had become
the dominant Native population there.”64 The settling of the Cahokia area can provide a case
study that emphasizes how incoming peoples – the twin groups of Jesuits and Seminarians –
interacted with both indigenous peoples (Cahokia, Tamaroa, and Peoria tribes) and a distinct
environment. Just as archaeologists have stressed differences in frontier outposts that reflect
proximities to Indian nations, availability of certain game and plants for specific diets, and
access to rivers, the same analysis holds true for French settlements occurring across only
sixty miles.65
Cahokia rapidly became a fur trading entrepot, advantaged by its location near the
confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri (and across from the future village of St. Louis).
Patterns of land and resource use began to develop in the area: farming (although limited),
fur trading, and the commercial services necessary to sustain a fluctuating population of river
traders, voyageurs for hire, and the permanent mission populations. The furs passing through
Cahokia in the early decades were not primarily beaver. The beaver of the Illinois country
63
Dan Hechenberger, “The Cahokia Tribe,” in M’Skutewe Awandiangi Vol. 3, p. 1
Ibid., p. 4.
65
For a good discussion of outpost distinctions revealed by archaeological analysis, see Dean L Anderson,
“Variability in Trade at Eighteenth-Century French Outposts,” in John A. Walthall, French Colonial
Archaeology: The Illinois Country and the Western Great Lakes (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991);
Robert Mazrim, “Now Quite Out of Society,” Archaeology and Frontier Illinois: Essays and Excavation
Reports by Robert Mazrim (Illinois Transportation Archaeological Research Program, 2002); see also Henry M.
Majors, Fort Ouiatanon and the Wabash River 1700-1824 (1970), unpublished manuscript, Lilly Library,
Indiana University, Bloomington.
64
73
were very light, “almost a straw color,” with thin fur of little value. However, other peltries
were shipped down the Mississippi to New Orleans “in great quantities.” By 1720, officials
of the Company of the Indies in Illinois were even planning to ship large numbers of buffalo
skins from the Wabash country.66 Although some historians have posited that arriving French
settlers to Cahokia inaugurated a “thriving agriculture,” there are suggestions that this was
not the case.67 On a 1735 map prepared by Father Superieur Jean-Baptiste Mercier, the
Cahokia lands reveal longlot holdings, a “cluster of arable fields.”68 Two points about this
map and census interpretation are important, not only for establishing comparisons between
Cahokia and the other French settlements, but because they highlight the importance of a
specific environment in determining the kind of community which would develop, in this
case, a transportation-trade nucleus with the largest, most enduring Catholic mission
settlement in the Illinois Country to anchor it.
First, several historians have drawn a distinction between the activities of Jesuits and the
activities of the Seminarians. Joseph Schlarman’s 1929 study of New France asserts that the
missionaries were characterized by a “restless craving” for exploration, that they too often
felt “the lure of the forest.” Footnote evidence for this, however, reveals remarks leveled at
Seminarians, by Seminarian authorities, in the very earliest years at Cahokia. Seminarian
authorities thought that several of the original missionaries, including St. Cosme and Davion,
“loved too much to roam about and make new discoveries.”69 The Seminarians may have
been directed, therefore, to remain more centralized and to develop their property holdings.
66
N.M. Miller Surrey, “The Fur Trade of Louisiana,” in The Commerce, p. 345.
Carl J. Ekberg, for instance, believes that the presence of seven French inhabitants on a 1723 census of
Cahokia reveals that “Cahokia was in the process of becoming an agricultural community” (Carl J. Ekberg,
French Roots in the Illinois Country: The Mississippi Frontier in Colonial Times (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 2000), p. 58.
68
Ibid.
69
Schlarman, From Quebec, p. 142; footnote references the Taschereau MS, Mission du Seminaire de Quebec
chez les Tamarois, in the Quebec Seminary Archives.
67
74
Carl Ekberg points out that the Jesuits demonstrated a much stronger “proselytizing
ambition.”70 Neither historian is weighing the importance of the Jesuits’ language facility and
consequent comfort level among outlying Indian villages. For whatever reasons, however,
the Seminarians began assiduously to develop their vast holdings at Cahokia; in the early
1720’s, they held a tract of land encompassing a full sixteen square leagues (approximately
100 square miles)! In 1722, French commanders in the Illinois Country, Broisbriant and des
Ursins, representing the Company of the Indies, granted the Seminarians this extensive tract.
The Seminarian concession was “unique in the Illinois Country,” and held within it all
forms of French settlement, including military garrison, mission house, both French village
and Indian (Cahokia-Tamaroa) village, and agricultural lands.71 While an exceptionally large
concession incorporating a variety of land features, Cahokia shares in common with St.
Philippe and Prairie du Rocher the extension of its lands up to the top of the bluffs. St.
Philippe, in fact, was a tiny, marshy settlement on a concession described as “one league
river frontage and two leagues inland.” The present-day bluff village of Renault is still
located on the southeast corner of the original Renault tract that contained St. Philippe.72
However, all the farmed longlots ended at the bluffs, a consistent practice in the St.,
Lawrence River Valley, the Illinois Country, and in the lower Mississippi Valley above New
Orleans: longlots were run from one specific land formation to another.73 The giant
limestone bluffs, topped with scrub trees in summit profusion, provided a natural
demarcation. From the sheltering rock walls of the bluffline on Mercier’s map, the Cahokia
70
Ekberg, French Roots, p. 55.
Ekberg, French Roots, p. 58.
72
Schlarman, From Quebec, p. 207.
73
This practice of extending longlots from geographical features has its origins in medieval France, described by
Marc Bloch in Les Caracteres Origineux de l’histoire Rurale de France and further discussed in Carl Ekberg,
French Roots, p. 9.
71
75
concession drifted toward the Mississippi River across approximately fifty arpents. It did so
in a series of bogs, marshes, and saturated wetlands. On the Mercier map, goose-egg shaped
droplets dot the land, identified as “marais” (swamp). This reality is all too evident in the
distribution of Cahokian commonlands, and, along with the Seminarian dedication to
permanency, must be accounted a factor in Cahokia’s small population and lesser agricultural
status. Seminarian missionaries, frustrated by the lack of French settlers and subsequent
agricultural development, often frustrated as well by their lack of success in converting
Indians, especially the proud and recalcitrant Peoria, began to think about mills.
At French settlements such as Chartres, Prairie du Rocher, and St. Genevieve (in
Missouri), the commons were apportioned in large tracts. Le Grande Champ at St.
Genevieve, in fact, is such an extensive, alluvial spread that it may still be viewed today from
the high land above it. Cahokia’s commons were scattered in bits and pieces. Carl Ekberg
identifies several of these in his study of French farming practices in the Illinois Country:
..in a low-lying area of less fertile land across the Riviere du Pont, lay one area of the
Cahokia commons. This was called “Prairie des Buttes,” prairie of the bluffs, for it lay
between the Mississippi and the bluffline. Other parts of the commons lay in other low-lying
areas along the Mississippi: one was located on the Isle de la St. Famille, which was
separated from the left riverbank by a slough; another was located between Cahokia Creek
and the Mississippi.74
The French mission and Indian villages at Cahokia lay in an area fingered with lakes,
small streams, tributaries, and inlets to the Mississippi. The Prairie du Pont river or creek
was especially fluctuant. As described in an early history of southern Illinois, it “...rises just a
couple of miles west of Belleville, flows west through the bluffs and makes its way across
the alluvial plain, occupying a new bed every few years.”75 The presence of so many small
74
Ekberg, French Roots, p. 60.
George Washington Smith, A History of Southern Illinois: A Narrative Account of its Historical Progress, its
People, and its Principal Interests (Chicago: The Lewis Publishing Company, 1912), p. 535.
75
76
feeder streams would likely result in the ecological phenomenon known as “backflooding.”
When the great rivers were at flood stage, overflow waters would pour into the tributaries,
over the banks, and into the already sodden earth. When Yankee settlers first encountered
the French living around the Detroit area, they coined the term “Muskrat Frenchmen,” for
these people who “lived almost in the water of [their] favorite stream or marsh.”76 Such a
sense of the French would cling to them, reinforced by settlement patterns in watery areas
like Cahokia.77 Agriculture was not developing at the rate it was farther down the French
coast, especially at Kaskaskia, located “on an alluvial plain that ultimately proved to be
superb for cereal-grain production.” 78
The tiny settlement of St. Philippe, about seven
miles north of Fort Chartres, was also described as marshy or swampy; it is sometimes
referred to as “St. Philippe de Grand Marais.”79 Some habitants at St. Philippe did negotiate
wheat-supplying contracts; the La Croix family entered into what has been called a “small
agribusiness” of wheat production and supply in the 1730’s, as did the original owner of the
St. Philippe concession, Philippe Renaut. These records seem somewhat exceptional,
however, in St. Philippe’s history.80 La Croix and Renault very likely owned the largest
number of arpents at St. Philippe. In 1765, the arriving British commander Thomas Stirling
would describe St. Philippe as having “some good farms.”81
76
Michigan Pioneer and Historical Collection, Vol. 1 (Lansing: W.S. George & Co., 1877), p. 352.
For a good discussion of the wet ground in the Cahokia Mounds area during the pre and proto-historic eras,
see Rinita A. Dalan et al, Envisioning Cahokia: A Landscape Perspective (DeKalb: Northern Illinois
University Press, 2003), especially pp. 81-84. The authors note that even the “General Land Office notes of
1810 describe the land in the vicinity of the mound groups... (prairie and Mississippi Bottom) as “wet.”
78
Carl Ekberg, French Roots, p. 172; see also Ekberg on visitors’ comments about the fine quality of wheat
grown at Kaskaskia in the first two decades of the eighteenth century, p. 191.
79
See Margaret Kimball Brown and Lawrie Cena Dean, The Village of Chartres in Colonial Illinois 1720 –
1765 (New Orleans: Polyanthos, Inc., 1977), Document K-118 (H768), p. 463.
80
Carl Ekberg, French Roots, p. 217-218.
81
Thomas Stirling, “Stirling’s Personal Journal of the Expedition: General Accounts of British Attempts to
Occupy the Illinois Country,” in Robert G. Carroon, ed., Broadswords & Bayonets (Illinois: The Society of
Colonial Wars in the State of Illinois, 1984), p. 91.
77
77
Given the greater agricultural success of the more southern French settlements – Prairie
du Rocher, Kaskaskia, and St. Genevieve across the river, Cahokia and St. Philippe were
noteworthy as two settlements of greater commercial and trade activity. Both maize and
wheat suffer in wet soils where the roots easily rot. The aboriginal transition to maize and
tobacco-growing has been documented archaeologically as occurring up on the high ground
above the American Bottom floodplain.82
The import of ground saturation for Cahokia lies
in its failure to attract French settlers, and therefore, its growth as a trade rather than
agricultural center. As with all the French settlements, there were good years for wheat and
maize and bad, but French settlers were slow to arrive in Cahokia, despite a conventional
interpretation that the Seminarians developed their large holdings and ministered “chiefly to
the French settlers.”83 In the first thirty years of settlement, the number of French settlers
never approached that at Kaskaskia, sixty miles to the south. In 1700, there were only seven
French inhabitants at Cahokia. The 1732 census does not include the numbers of French
inhabitants there but does list African slaves and domestic animals, both in such small
numbers as to imply little growth in French settlement. In 1732, Kaskaskia had 102 slaves,
St. Anne de Fort Chartres, 37, St. Philippe, 22, and Cahokia, 4.84 This is clear evidence of a
lack of agricultural growth. In 1731, the priest at the Seminarian Cahokia Mission, Father
(Monsignor) Mercier, began to purchase land from the Indians in an effort to lure French
immigrants down to the Illinois Country.85 The Seminarians were in contact with the
82
See discussion of maize-growing on the uplands after 1000 A.D. in Chapter One.
Schlarman, From Quebec, p. 148.
84
Schlarman, From Quebec, p. 206. See also Carl J. Ekberg’s discussion of this census in French Roots, p. 58.
85
John A. Walthall and Elizabeth D. Benchley, The River L’Abbe Mission: A French Colonial Church for the
Cahokia Illini at Monk’s Mound (Springfield, Illinois: Illinois Historic Preservation Agency, 1987), p. 1; see
also Father Mercier’s letter, April 12, 1735, to the Quebec Seminary, printed in its entirety in Schlarman, From
Quebec, pp. 280-284. This letter is important in that it specifically describes land and climate constraints at the
Cahokia mission, including annual flux and flow of water (creating problems in the building of mills), drainage
of water, location of arable land, and location of bluff forests of white walnut whose wood “is very clear.” This
83
78
Cahokia and Tamaroa tribes yet still felt themselves to be isolated. Father Mercier exclaims
wistfully, “If only twenty families would come down from Canada...more than two hundred
habitants could be wonderfully placed.” This view was perhaps colored by an exceptional
wheat harvest that year, 1732; Mercier described it as “3500 bundles of the best wheat in the
world.”86 By 1743, however, he was complaining to Vaudreuil, Governor of Louisiana, “We
do not grind enough grain to pay the miller....”87
Father Mercier was full of plans for how the Cahokia Mission could be developed,
especially in the building of mills. The granting of land in French North America carried an
implicit responsibility for development, for the improvements which would lure other settlers
and foster agriculture and industries that would in time repay the crown. Such responsibilities
were also felt by priests, who were “nothing more than the undertakers of the settlement of a
territory.”88 The 1735 letter by Fathers Mercier and Courier is interesting because their
development ideas clearly focus on discussions of water and mills. The letter contains at
least ten specific references to mills, the placing of mills, the problems of high and low
water, the seasonal droughts:
The rivier du pont [river of the bridge] also issues from a swamp and flows quite gently
into the mississippi, almost directly across from the former village of the Kaskaskias. The
mississippi never backwaters it to such an extent that it would not turn a mill a short distance
above the place where a bridge is indicated. It is the cost of the dam and the lack of water
in the long droughts which have kept us from building one there rather than in the hills.89
Father Mercier also compares the efforts of the Seminarians in building mills to the efforts of
the Jesuits sixty miles to the south, in Kaskaskia. Priests at both establishments obviously
walnut was used for the construction of the new mission house (see Father Mercier letter of May 25, 1732, in
Schlarman, p. 288). The fact that it was timber hauled down from the bluffs suggests depletion of the wood
reserves on the floodplain of the Cahokia grant, despite a low French settler population. It may reflect the need
for fuel of the Cahokia-Tamaroa Indians whose village was nearby on the grant.
86
Mercier letter, August 3, 1732, cited in Schlarman, From Quebec, p. 290.
87
Mercier letter, April 20, 1743, cited in Schlarman, From Quebec, p. 284.
88
Schlarman, From Quebec, p. 280.
89
Fathers Mercier and Courier, letter of April 12, 1735, cited in Schlarman, From Quebec, p. 280.
79
knew what the others were doing. Kaskaskia, however, was shipping rich wheat harvests to
New Orleans as the principal supplier in annual convoys beginning in the 1720’s.90 By 1732,
Kaskaskia had fourteen gristmills whereas St. Philippe had only two.91 Also at Kaskaskia,
the Kaskaskian Indians had moved two leagues north of the settlement, relocated by the
incoming French commander Broisbriant in 1721. They lived on a prairie which became
named for them.92 Unless Kaskaskian Indians journeyed to French Kaskaskia, they were out
of sight of the French residents. At Cahokia, the village of the Tamaroa was located near to
both the Mission of the Holy Family (on the Isle de la Famille in the Mississippi) and the
Mississippi shore; Father Mercier’s 1735 letter clearly states this adjacency. In simple terms,
what this meant for the French living near the mission on the Cahokia grant was daily sight
of Indians. The Peoria tribe to the north frequently came to stay with the Cahokia and
Tamaroa Indians; they especially did so under pressure from Fox raids.93 Historians have
speculated that as the French priests acquired more land from the Illinois tribes near Cahokia,
Indians reacted with hostility. The so-called Cahokia “revolt” is credited to Cahokian
dissatisfaction with incursions of the French onto their hunting and agricultural grounds.
This explanation – that white settlement invaded and disturbed hunting territories of Indians
– so often appears in historical interpretations that it must be both questioned and expanded.
On the Cahokia grant that included much watery ground and a series of named marshes,
it is likely as well that the amount of prairie in these bottomlands was as high as fifty per
90
See “The Trade of the Illinois Country” in N.M. Miller Surrey, The Commerce of Louisiana During the
French Regime: 1699-1763 (1916), p. 288.
91
Carl Ekberg, French Roots, p. 266.
92
Palm, Jesuit Missions, p. 49; Natalia Maree Belting, Kaskaskia Under the French Regime (New Orleans:
Polyanthos, 1975), p. 58.
93
Dan Hechenberger, “The Peoria Tribe,” in M’Skutewe Awandiangwi 1(3), 1998, p. 1; see also the August 3,
1732 letter from Father Mercier, printed in Schlarman, From Quebec, p. 290.
80
cent.94 The references to prairies in letters from Seminarians (as well as the named prairies,
both small and large, occurring around Fort Chartres and the Village of Chartres), support
this conclusion. Thick with indigenous grasses growing as high as a man’s head, obscuring
and obstructing riders on horses, filled with noxious insects and a humid, choking heat in
high summer, these tallgrass prairies were not the home of myriad animal populations
capable of providing a sustained protein base for Indian populations as high as 2000.95
Tallgrass prairies and wetlands attract small mammals and birds like rabbits, prairie chickens,
squirrels, and mice, all of which were hunted and consumed by both Indians and French. The
roving herds of deer and bison on the floodplain described by seventeenth century French
rapidly disappeared as a consistent food source. From the time of the permanent French
settlements, a major protein source for Indians and frequently, for French themselves, came
from buffalo tenderloins, carried back to villages by Indians in massive packs after days of
smoking and drying on the prairie uplands.96 Pork became important as well, especially for
the inhabitants of agricultural communities like the village of Chartres and Kaskaskia.
Notarial records as early as 1724 detailing land and home sales and transfers for the village
of Chartres mention hogs; in 1726 hams “of fifteen or sixteen pounds in weight” were listed
as part of a selling price.97
Although the Illinois Indians living in “domiciled” villages were still going on summer
and winter hunts, their more permanent occupation of lands would have accelerated
environmental change. The abundant waterfowl described by Hennepin and St. Cosme in
1698 were sharing the Cahokia grant not only with Indian villages experiencing many
94
Personal communication, John White, Ecological Services, Urbana, Illinois, February, 2004.
See Table 4, Illinois Indian locales: 1699-1700 in Joseph Zitomersky, French Americans-Native Americans,
p. 203.
96
See letter from Father Binneteau in 1699, cited in Edna Kenton, The Jesuit Relations, p. 326-327.
97
Brown and Dean, The Village of Chartres, Doc. K-25 (H173), p. 359.
95
81
changes of population but with a large French mission complex; the Seminarians were
involved with land-clearing, millbuilding, and orchard-planting. Gradually across thirty
years, despite the lesser French population, the Cahokia grant become a peopled world. The
impression of human activity at Cahokia is strong, conveyed by a sense of arrival, departure,
of the coming and going of tribes and traders. Its location near the confluence area of Big
Rivers attracted the down-river trade traffic. While there is little direct evidence of a severe
decline in resident and migratory bird populations on the Cahokia grant, archaeologists who
have excavated an eighteenth century French colonial site called the Cahokia Wedge site
have found a lacunae in faunal remains: very low numbers of waterfowl. “Although ducks,
shorebirds, and marsh birds would have been especially abundant along the floodplain during
their spring and fall migration, these species are underrepresented at the Cahokia Wedge
site.”98 Additional findings from this site indicate low numbers of domestic animals in
comparison with other French sites in the Illinois Country; however, trumpeter swan wing
bones were represented, as well as large blue catfish.99 The lead archaeologist, Terrance J.
Martin, speculates that the Cahokia French consumption pattern was more similar to Indian
consumption patterns – a “selective procure[ment] of local resources on a seasonal basis in a
pattern resembling Native American adaptation.”100 Questions can be raised about what this
may have meant – did the French settlers simply prefer certain sources of protein, or was the
waterfowl population being affected by the mobility and trade culture around Cahokia?
The Cahokia Indians, like the Peoria to the north, had used bird populations in ritualistic
and adornment practices. The trumpeter swan, for instance, becomes flightless during the
98
Terrance J. Martin, “Animal Remains From the Cahokia Wedge Site,” in Bonnie L. Gums, Archaeology at
French Colonial Cahokia (Springfield: Illinois Historic Preservation Agency, 1988), p. 230.
99
Terrance J. Martin, “Animal Remains,” p. 233.
100
Ibid., p. 228.
82
molting season over the summer.101 At this time, they can be captured without need of
weapons. Swansdown and swanskin, cut from a mature trumpeter swan, would furnish a
delicately warm clothing layer and glorious feathers. The same can be inferred for an extinct
species, the Carolina paroquet (parakeet), whose long, brilliant green feathers were seen
sailing among and drooping from river trees in the American Bottom. Deliette’s description
of the calumet he saw among the Peoria in 1678 is specific for the incorporation of feathers:
“...this calumet is made in the form of a hatchet...it has a very long handle, from which are
hung several feathers painted red, yellow, and black, brought together in the form of a fan.
This handle is moreover covered with the skins of ducks’ necks.”102 Additional descriptions
of the calumet of the Illinois Indians are found in the Jesuit Relations: “It is ornamented with
the heads and necks of various birds, whose plumage is very beautiful. To these they also add
large feathers – red, green, and other colors – wherewith the whole is adorned. They have a
great regard for it....”103 In addition to the role of birds, birdskins, and bird spirits in raiding
and cosmology, birds were important in Indian adornment. The few representations of
Illinois Indians drawn from the eighteenth century show them brilliantly adorned with
feathers. The men have rippling sprays of upright feathers on their (roached) hair. Illinois
men wore a long, pendant hair ornament suspended from the crown of the head with a woven
thong. A photograph of such an ornament, collected before 1845, shows “wrapped quillwork
as well as hair and feather pendants.”104 In a rare 1735 painting of Illinois Indians taken to
New Orleans, the chief is shown standing with his hand on the head of a crane.105 Later
101
H. David Bolen, The Birds of Illinois, p. 20.
Pierre Deliette, “De Gannes Memoir,” p. 391.
103
Jesuit Relations, Vol. 59, p. 131, cited in Thorne Deuel, American Indian, p. 48, n.
104
See photograph and caption in Callender, “Illinois,” in The Handbook, p. 675.
105
See reproduction of this painting in Callender, “Illinois,” in The Handbook, p. 677.
102
83
portraits of Peoria men executed by George Catlin in the 1830’s also reveal masses of
feathers used in original ways, although these Peoria were living in Kansas at the time.106
By the 1730’s, the Cahokia grant was almost certainly a more altered habitat. Indians
living adjacent to the French faced issues of deforestation (affecting both firewood
availability and bird populations); availability of small game; and possible soil exhaustion on
overworked and constantly-used Indian plots.107 Accounts of bird populations on the
Mississippi River below Cahokia continued, however. In 1751 the Frenchman Bossu wrote a
description of the St. Francis River in present-day Arkansas. Bossu was an officer in the
party ascending the Mississippi, led by the incoming Commander Macarty. He observed the
(undisturbed ) bird populations near the mouth of the St. Francis, an unsettled area: “The
game is so plentiful...that when we stopped for the night on its shores [the St. Francis], it was
impossible to sleep, because of the multitude of swans, cranes, geese, bustards, and
ducks....”108 In 1765 the British commander Thomas Stirling described the Illinois Country
as containing “...millions of waterfowl....”109 Stirling listed waterfowl species and even
described the adornment of the calumet with waterfowl feathers. However, Stirling’s
destination was Fort Chartres, and there is little direct evidence that he journeyed on up to
Cahokia, an additional forty miles. His journal account of Cahokia contains virtually no
description, merely enumerated information.110 In general, except for strong impressions of
106
Several of George Catlin’s paintings of the Peoria appear in Callender, “Illinois,” in The Handbook, p. 679.
Archaeologists posit that the abandonment in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries of the American Bottom
by the Middle-Mississippian agrarian culture was likely due to this very factor: soil exhaustion on constantlyworked plots, expressed as “localized environmental degradation caused by an overexploitation of the
resources.” For a discussion of this point, see Thomas E. Emerson and James A. Brown, “The Late Prehistory
and Protohistory of Illinois,” in Calumet & Fleur-de-Lys, p. 97.
108
Bossu, cited in Schlarman, From Quebec, p. 293.
109
Thomas Stirling, in Carroon, Broadswords & Bayonets, p. 94.
110
Stirling writes only five short sentences about Cahokia, mentioning that “It contains betwixt sixty and
seventy houses and has a Church.” He furnishes no description of the land or habitat. See Thomas Stirling in
Carroon, Broadswords & Bayonets, p. 90.
107
84
Kaskaskia as a resplendent agricultural community, observers tended to gloss the entire
Illinois Country as one environment.
It is not possible to compare the numbers of waterfowl observed in the 1790’s with the
original bird populations in the Big Rivers area at the time the French arrived. Such values
must be taken from descriptions such as this one by Father Marest in 1712: “We find here,
especially, multitudes of swans, cranes, bustards [geese] and ducks; the wild oats, which
grow freely on the plains, fatten them to such a degree that they very often die, their own fat
suffocating them. Turkeys are likewise found here in abundance....”111 In November of
1750, Father Vivier described the environment along the Mississippi River well below
Kaskaskia, specifically mentioning “a prodigious number of ducks...of bustards, geese,
swans, snipe." When he writes of the French settlements, perhaps specifically Kaskaskia
where he was working, he mentions only the abundant game, “ox” and “deer.” He does not
write of birds. Yet in another letter he does mention waterfowl. The pattern is tentative.112
However, changes in the natural habitat of the Cahokia, changes that may have affected
waterfowl populations, comprise only one possible factor in events leading to the Cahokia
revolt of the early 1730’s. The Cahokia and Peoria Indians were also proving difficult
spiritual subjects. There is evidence from the letters of Father Mercier in 1732 that successful
conversion of the Cahokia and especially, the Peoria, was eluding priests. The Peoria, often
described as “arch-traditional,” in fact were perceived as impediments to the conversion of
111
Father Marest letter of 1712, in Reuben Gold Thwaites, editor, The Jesuit Relations, Vol. 66.
Letter from Father Vivier, November 17, 1750, in Thwaites, Jesuit Relations, Vol. 69, p. 209 (for lower
Mississippi); see p. 219 for French settlements in the Illinois Country. Also see William Cronon on perceptions
left by Europeans and on ways to estimate or reconstruct animal and bird populations, in Changes in the Land:
Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), pp. 6-8. Cronon
discusses “...those awkward situations in which an ecological change which undoubtedly must have been
occurring in the colonial period has left little or no historical evidence at all.”
112
85
the more tractable Cahokia.113 By the early 1730’s, the relations between the French settling
around the Cahokia mission and the Cahokia and Peoria Indians worsened. The dynamic of
population must be accorded a role in escalating tensions. An important study by Joseph
Zitomersky focusing on the population geography of the Illinois Indians stresses “patterns of
mutually supportive relationships that existed between Indian and colonial groups.”114
Zitomersky believes that Indians had a state-sanctioned role as food suppliers. “Our own
work suggests that in the Illinois country... the food producers were often the Illinois Indians
themselves, whose productivity may have increased through the mills and draft animals
which the French introduced into their settlements....”115 The ratio of Illinois Indians living
on the Cahokia grant to the actual numbers of French creates questions about that food
supplier role. Conventional interpretations stressing Indian hostility over invasion of
traditional life ways and subsistence patterns overlook hostility created by inadequate and
vacillating opportunities for trade. Where there are high and growing numbers of incoming
colonists in a frontier region, the role of Indians as initial food suppliers is important. When
the number of inhabitants is small enough to rapidly develop a self-sustaining economic
world, as on the Cahokia grant, the shift in relations of power and dependence between
colonists and Indians is ominous. The irritation the Cahokia felt when French pigs and cattle
roamed into their fields was perhaps exacerbated by the reality that this livestock was owned
by only eleven Frenchmen. In 1732, the estimated village population for the Cahokia Indians
was 1480.116 Although there would have been some French soldiers, French voyageurs and
113
See letter of Father Mercier to M. Lyon of Quebec Seminary, August 3, 1732, printed in Schlarman, From
Quebec, p. 290. Mercier exclaims, “If only the Peoria were away from here! – they will leave this fall – we
could have some hopes of doing something with several Kahos [Cahokia Indians].”
114
Joseph Zitomersky, French Americans-Native Americans, p. 17.
115
Ibid., p. 19.
116
See Table 29, Illinois Indian estimated village populations, in Zitomersky, French-Americans-Native
Americans, p. 321.
86
traders, and other Europeans at the Cahokia settlement from time to time, the difference
between French and Indian population on this grant is striking. No other Illinois tribes
supported the Cahokia in their so-called “revolt.” The explanation for this is not political but
demographic and economic. Other Illinois tribes had too much to lose. In the Kaskaskian
village, sixty miles to the south, Indians produced maize and wheat and had a thriving French
population downriver to sell it to; because of the garrison of soldiers at Fort Chartres, they
also furnished game for the troops. Kaskaskian chiefs even journeyed up to Cahokia to try to
restore order and security between the French and the Cahokia.117
In May of 1733, resident priests and several inhabitants of the French village “fled at
night” after a warning that the Cahokia might rise up and massacre them.118
Such fears had
been exacerbated by the 1729 Natchez Revolt on the lower Mississippi. In the environs of
Fort Rosalie, the Natchez Indians laid careful plans to entrap French settlers. Using what one
historian has called “a familiar pattern of frontier exchange,” the Natchez welcomed French
visitors with tribute and promises of food and furs. They then massacred “145 men, 36
women, and 56 children, and captured nearly 300 Negro slaves in addition to some 50 white
women and children.”119
The story of the Natchez Revolt has particular parallels with the
French Illinois settlement history in Cahokia. Like the declining numbers of the Illinois
Indians to the north, the Natchez had been decimated by contagious diseases and compressed
by French land grants. From initial population estimates of perhaps 3500 before the advent
of the French, the Natchez numbered barely half that, scattered among five villages.120
117
Mary Borgias Palm, The Jesuit Missions, p. 71.
Walthall and Benchley, The River L’Abbe Mission, p. 8.
119
Daniel H. Usner, Jr. Indians, Settlers, & Slaves, p. 72; see the account of the massacre in the letter from
Father le Petit, Missionary, to Father d’Avaugour, Procurator of the Missions in North America, July, 1730, in
The Indians, ed. by Edna Kenton, pp. 439-440.
120
Daniel H. Usner, Jr., Indians, Settlers, and Slaves, p. 66.
118
87
Father Le Petit reported in 1730 that “In former times the Nation of the Natchez was very
large. It counted sixty villages and eight hundred suns or Princes; now it is reduced to six
little Villages and eleven Suns.”121 Also like the Natchez, the Illinois used livestock and
food-theft raids against white settlers as a prime weapon. In 1722, in a single week, the
Natchez “killed eleven cattle...and stole three horses, sixteen pigs, six quarts of flour, fifty
quarts of corn, fifty quarts of potatoes, and forty quarts of beans.”122 The French in Illinois
had heard all about the Natchez revolt and the bloody massacre of innocent French men,
women and children. The restiveness of the Cahokia and their depredations against livestock
seemed harbingers of disaster. In 1733, the commandant at Fort Chartres, St. Ange, wrote to
France to request additional troops, mentioning “the wrong which they [the Cahokia] have
done the inhabitants [settlers] by killing their animals.”123 In 1732, a letter from Father
Mercier refers to the “trouble we have had with them [the Cahokia].”124 As a result of the
(bloodless) Cahokia Revolt in the early 1730’s, the French insisted on the tribe removing
from the French mission area. The Cahokia eventually settled near the Cahokia mounds,
specifically the great terraced Monks Mound, nine miles away from the French. There the
River L’Abbe mission was established for their benefit, and the French assisted the Cahokia
in the plowing of fresh fields for their corn.125 In addition, the new Commander
D’Artaguiette posted French soldiers to the small French fort at Cahokia and issued a
punitive message to the Cahokia: they would receive no French presents until “they repair
121
Letter from Father Le Petit, in The Indians, ed. by Edna Kenton, p. 430.
See documents in the Mississippi Provincial Archives, French Documents: “Narrative of the Hostilities
Committed by the Natchez Against the Concession of St. Catherine, October 21, November 4, 1722,” cited in
Usner, p. 67.
123
St. Ange, cited in Walthall and Benchley, The River L’Abbe Mission, p. 9.
124
Walthall and Benchley, The River L’Abbe Mission, p. 8.
125
Walthall and Benchley, The River L’Abbe Mission, p. 10.
122
88
the wrongs which they have done.”126 Estimated population figures for the Illinois Indian
tribes between 1723 and 1733 reveal a dramatic drop in the population of the Cahokia
village: from 1800 to 473. The sharp drop after 1732 can perhaps be explained by the
relocation of some Cahokia to the River L’Abbe Mission; yet by comparison, the Kaskaskia
in their village to the south fell only from 1000 to 930.127
While the Cahokia had been attacked repeatedly by the northern raiding Fox prior to the
Fox defeat of 1730, the drop in population cannot be explained just through tribal warfare.
Other theories advanced for population decline among the Illinois include monogamy
introduced by Christianity, thus affecting the birth rate; epidemics; and the use made of
Illinois Indians by the French who recruited them for military campaigns.128 The Cahokia
and Peoria had contributed large numbers of warriors to the French campaign against the Fox
Indians in 1730. St. Ange, the French commander from Fort Chartres, appeared at the battle
site – the Grand Prairie of north-central Illinois – with “one hundred French and four hundred
Indians.”129 In 1736, Indians from the Illinois Confederacy would march south under
D’Artaguiette in an ill-fated expedition against the Chickasaw; and by the 1740’s, Illinois
Indians were participating in French-directed raids against English settlements in the Ohio
Valley.130 Indian losses in these expeditions are not concretely known. In addressing the
126
Ibid.
See Table 29, Illinois Indian estimated village populations, in Zitomersky, p. 321.
128
For an in-depth discussion of these factors, see Emily J. Blasingham, “The Depopulation of the Illinois
Indians Part II,” Ethnohistory, Vol. 3, No. 4, 1956, p. 386- 396.
129
Schlarman, From Quebec, p. 215; for a detailed account of the slaughter of the Fox Indians on the Illinois
Grand Prairie, see R. David Edmunds and Joseph L. Peyser, The Fox Wars: The Mesquakie Challenge to New
France (Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993), especially, pp. 138-157 for careful
reconstruction of the Fox-French battle on September 8-9, 1730.
130
For the Chickasaw Wars, see the account of the orders to D’Artaguiette to “raise as many men as he could –
soldiers, Canadians, French, and Illinois Indians,” in Schlarman, From Quebec, p. 273; see p. 277 for an
account of the second campaign in 1739 in which Illinois Indians also fought; also see Blasingham, “The
Depopulation.” p. 378-379. For raids against English settlements, see Blasingham, p. 379; for continuing
French use of Illinois (“Mississippi”) Indians in raids against western Pennsylvania through the 1740’s, see
Minutes of the Provincial Council of Pennsylvania, Vol. 5 (Harrisburg: Theo Penn and Co., 1855), p. 1-5.
127
89
radical drop in population of Indians living in traditional village sites on the Cahokia grant,
Joseph Zitomersky suggests that the Cahokia eventually embraced out-migration to the north,
back into the region of the Peoria on the Illinois River. The northward movement of the
Cahokia Indians is actually accounted a factor in the relative stability of the Peoria tribe
between 1733 and 1763.131 After 1733, it was the French-Indian nuclei of Kaskaskia and
Fort Chartres that attained importance militarily and agriculturally. Significantly, following
the relocation of the Cahokia, the French colonial population at the mission settlement of
Cahokia grew from 11 to 113 individuals.132
The history of the French Catholic efforts in the Illinois Country can be seen as a stream
of small, localized and initial successes at long-lasting ministries like Cahokia and Kaskaskia
and at on-the-spot encounters out in Indian villages. Such history is punctuated with thefts,
depredations, regression of Indian converts, and the destruction of property. In 1752, for
instance, in an interrogation of a Piankeshaw chief, Le Loup, Commander Macarty at Fort
Chartres mentions the “stealing of the sacred vessels.” He writes, “Nor was he [the Miami
who stole the vessels] the sole culprit since the booty had been distributed among several
cabins of Illinois.”133 By the early 1750’s, the French at Fort Chartres were desperately
trying to keep the loyalty of the Illinois Indians as tensions escalated toward the Seven Years
War. French-Indian interaction had shifted along a trajectory that had begun with the
Indians’ proposed conversion to Catholicism and French ways, then to their peaceful cohabitation with the French on French concessions; then to their removal to independent
villages two to six leagues distant from the French; and finally, to an international political
struggle in which the Illinois tribes were traded with, used as intermittent food suppliers,
131
Joseph Zitomersky, French-Americans-Native-Americans, p. 353.
Zitomersky, p. 351.
133
Macarty to Vaudreuil, January 1752, in Pease, Illinois on the Eve, p. 451.
132
90
gifted, proselytized, and eventually denied French aid relative to their loyalty. This record is
clearest on the Cahokia grant. Yet such a narrative was also accompanied by changes in the
ecosystem in which permanency of settlement created new ways of relating to land and
habitat. In the village of Chartres, near the French bastion of Fort Chartres, a different tale
unfolds between 1721 and 1752. Despite little documentary evidence available for the
Illinois tribe living near the fort, the Mechigamea, the survival of the Chartres notarial
records and archaeological data allow a reconstruction that may be contrasted with what
happened on the Cahokia grant.
91
French Illinois: Patterns of Settlement: Chartres, 1720 - 1752
One of the tragic mysteries of the French discovery of the Mississippi occurred when the
canoe of Louis Joliet capsized on his return trip to Quebec in 1674. Joliet was likely “the
most expert map maker” in New France at that time; he had visited France and may have
spent time in cartographic workshops learning the use of the astrolabe. With his training and
careful documentation, he and Father Marquette charted over one thousand miles of the
Mississippi, and Joliet may well have noted in detail the area that would become the heart of
the French settlements in southern Illinois. The loss of all of Joliet’s notes, journals,
sketches, and maps in the Ottawa River capsizement may well be one of the accidents of
history that changed history.1 The locating of French Fort Chartres across from what would
become the St. Louis area was not based on informed cartography, and the question remains:
why did the French seeking to establish a garrison in the Illinois Country build the first
(wooden) Fort Chartres exactly where they did?2
Today, high levees running parallel to the Mississippi have created a quarter mile swamp
between the levee and the Illinois shore; in addition to dense vegetation and standing water,
the levee itself obstructs any view of the floodplain from the river. But in the year 1718,
when the French arrived to establish a fort midway between New Orleans and their
Wisconsin outposts, the bottomland would have rolled back from the shore, as much as fifty
percent open prairie. When Fort Chartres was constructed and fledgling agriculture begun
1
Betty L. Madden, Art, Crafts, and Architecture in Early Illinois (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974), p.
16.
2
In at least two other periods of the eighteenth century, French administrators argued for the location of Fort
Chartres at Kaskaskia and at Cahokia. Both areas were seen as more advantageous due to river confluences. The
Fort Chartres location lay on a level prairie between the Kaskaskia River, seventeen miles to the south, and the
Big Rivers area to the north.
92
around it, the prairie-woodland mosaic was a fire-managed environment sculpted by Indians
for centuries. Both prehistoric and historic Indians had identified specific soils with highest
fertility. Contrary to sweeping European accounts, the earth here was not uniformly alluvial
and rich. Indian farmers had carefully located patches of exceptionally fertile, black soil.
The success of agriculture in the Chartres area led directly to a flourishing trade matrix and
involved the Mechigamea tribe especially as provisioners. Located between the wheatfarming settlement of Kaskaskia to the south and the large, watery Cahokia grant to the
north, the villages of Chartres, Prairie du Rocher, and St. Philippe drew Indians from all
directions, including the Missouri lands across the Mississippi. French censuses give
numbers for French inhabitants, African and Indian slaves, and for Illinois Indians living in
these locations and in their own, sequestered villages; and all traditional histories of the area
stress the small number of persons, the lack of burgeoning growth. But these French farmers
and military and their slaves, both black and Indian (panis) were like islands in a river of
human traffic whose power and flow never got into official censuses. The success story of
agriculture here, usually credited to annual flooding of the Mississippi and to the French,
must begin with human perception, selection, and management practices much older than
those of the relocating French. The Chartres settlement fit into a continuum of human
occupancy. The prairies of the bottomlands and the oak-hickory savanna on the upland till
plain were both products of perhaps millennia of human burning practices. That careful
management, in addition to a selective agriculture, had built upon and enlarged a tri-partite
ecosystem of great richness. In virtually all European accounts, however, the fertility of the
earth is accounted a product of “nature.”
93
Reconstructions and accounts describe the arrival of the Company of the Indies in 1718,
the granting of concessions to habitants, military elite, and Jesuits, and the building of a small
wooden fort surrounded by palings in 1720. A typical description appears in Mary Borgias
Palm, The Jesuit Missions of the Illinois Country: “He [De Boisbriant] chose a site near the
east bank of the Mississippi on flat alluvial bottom land, sixteen miles above Kaskaskia.”3
Relying on company correspondence, letters to New France and the governor, and on
impressions and journals kept by the French in the 1720’s, historians tell the story of Fort
Chartres and the village of Chartres in the same way. Pierre DuGue Sieur de Boisbriant
apparently sailed up the Mississippi from the mouth of the Kaskaskia, or traveled seventeen
miles overland across wet, bottomland prairies before deciding on the spot.
Although the mission at Cahokia had been founded in 1699, until the 1718 arrival of
“young” Boisbriant (he was 47 at the time), French Illinois had no fort, no government, and
no official French presence other than the Seminarians and Jesuits.4 Lieutenant De
Boisbriant, described as a “young French Canadian officer... the King’s military
representative in Louisiana,” reached the Kaskaskia mission in December, 1718, where he
stayed for eighteen months.5 De Boisbriant was to find and select a site for a French fort
which would “command the movements up and down through the Mississippi Valley.”6 It is
clear that the building of Fort Chartres was conceived within the ambit of French empire in
the North America. At least one historian has posited that the incessant raids of the Fox “as
3
Mary Borgias Palm, The Jesuit Missions of the Illinois Country 1673 –1763 (Cleveland, Ohio: Saint Louis
University, 1931), p. 50.
4
Carl Ekberg points this out in French Roots in the Illinois Country: The Mississippi Frontier in Colonial
Times (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), p. 33.
5
George W. Smith, History of Illinois and Her People Vol. I (Chicago: The American Historical Society, Inc.,
1927), p. 118-119. See also Palm, The Jesuit Missions, p. 50-51. Boisbriant or Boisbriand was Commandant in
the Illinois Country between 1719 – 1724. A French-Canadian from Montreal, he is described as “very popular
with the Indians because he knew Indian languages and had an interest in their welfare.” See the Dictionary of
Canadian Biography, Vol. II (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969).
6
George W. Smith, History of Illinois, p. 119.
94
far south as Fort Chartres” necessitated “keep[ing] a garrison there in order to protect
Michigamea [an Indian village] which was one half league north of the fort.”7 While this
may have been an ancillary consideration, De Boisbriant established a firm military presence
in upper Louisiana under the auspices of the Company of the Indies (also known as the
Company of the West). He rowed up the Mississippi from New Orleans in a canoe flotilla. In
his ten craft were packed “government officials, workingmen and a hundred troops.”8
Arriving at the confluence of the Kaskaskia and the Mississippi Rivers, he found at the
mission a conglomerate of French farmers, voyageurs, and both Kaskaskia and Mechigamea
Indians. De Boisbriant set about reorganizing this settlement. He first built a fort, and then
about the same time, he divided the Kaskaskia mission population into three groups,
effectively purifying the French settlement. He relocated the Kaskaskia Indians north onto
the upland plains above French Kaskaskia and the Mechigamea Indians north of the new fort.
Peoples who had been living together in such proximity as to encourage Indian-French
marriages and births were wholly separated; the Mechigamea village would lie eighteen
miles away.
The same frontier population mosaic existed at Cahokia as at Kaskaskia: French
missionaries, French farmers (although many fewer in number), travelers and traders – and at
least three Indian tribes. The question of why De Boisbriant acted to divide the Kaskaskia
and the Mechigamia from the French at Kaskaskia has never been answered clearly.
According to Father Charlevoix, who passed through Kaskaskia in 1721, “...it was thought
7
See discussion by Wayne C. Temple, Indian Villages of the Illinois Country: Historic Tribes (Springfield:
Illinois State Museum, 1958), p. 41. Temple bases this point on documents in the Mississippi Provincial
Archives: French Dominion, III, 514.
8
Palm, p. 49.
95
proper to form two villages of savages instead of one.”9 A possible explanation may lie in
the presence of the Jesuits, who quickly built a small house in the Mechigamea village.
Perhaps Jesuit missionaries discerned the need to minister to tribes exclusively; if so, this
suggests the tempering and shaping of Jesuit interaction with specific Illinois Indian tribes –
a pattern evident in their translation and linguistic work. The long-term Jesuit preference for
separating resident Indian tribes from French populations may also have been a factor.10 One
clear result of proximate Indian and French populations was the blending of French and
Indian families. Limited records exist from the 1720’s for St. Anne’s Parish Church,
founded to serve the population of the village of Chartres near the new fort. Between 1721
and 1726 – the only years records survive until 1743 – priests recorded marriages, baptisms,
births, and the names of godparents on 29 occasions. In eight of these entries, an Indian
woman is listed as the wife, mother, baptismal recipient, or godparent. Sometimes the
women are identified as “an Illinois,” or “a free Padoucah;” in other cases, the word Indian is
used, as in this poignant entry: “This same year 1721...was born a daughter of Brigitte, an
Indian girl, known as “The Lame One”; the father is unknown.”11 In three of the records, the
actual name is recorded, as in the 1725 marriage of Jean Baptiste Lalande and Catherine
8abana Kie8e.12 This evidence is for the village of Chartres after the French were separated
from the Mechigamea and Kaskaskia. Despite distances, French soldiers (especially) were
continuing to form long-lasting liaisons with Indian women. On the Cahokia grant, the
Seminarians did not seek to divide the Tamaroa from the Cahokia, although priests were
9
Charlevoix, cited in Palm, p. 49.
Carl J. Ekberg argues that De Boisbriant was concerned about the effect of brandy on the Kaskaskia Indians
and wanted to remove them from the “ready supply of spiritous liquors” in French Kaskaskia. See Ekberg,
Francois Valle and his world: Upper Louisiana before Louis and Clark (Columbia: University of Missouri
Press, 2000) p. 9.
11
Margaret Kimball Brown and Lawrie Cena Dean, The Village of Chartres in Colonial Illinois 1720 – 1765
(New Orleans: Polyanthos, 1977) Record D-2, p. 5.
12
Brown and Dean, The Village of Chartres, Record D-9, p. 11.
10
96
relieved when the visiting Peoria returned north to the Illinois River. Perhaps the very low
numbers of resident French did not produce the number of French-Indian liaisons – or the
level of administrative concern – as happened farther south. The combined military,
economic, and religious vision of France for colonies in the Illinois Country found its most
synthetic expression south of Cahokia.
Soon after arriving in Kaskaskia, De Boisbriant set out to select a fort site. From
descriptions of property bought and sold in the village of Chartres, growing up in the prairie
next to the fort, certain features of the original terrain can be gleaned. There was a fairly
substantial ash grove lying between the site of the fort and the Mississippi River; a small
feeder inlet of the Mississippi which became the Coulee Deneau ran to the northwest,
becoming a convenient separator of the French lands from those of the Mechigamea Indians;
the bottomlands held a considerable number of red mulberry trees that soon proved excellent
wood for the posts and palings used by the French to surround their homes and lots; and the
land between French Kaskaskia and the newly-erected fort likely contained tallgrass prairie
(meadows), marshes, and stands or groves of elm, hackberry, cottonwood, and sycamore.13
The early Government Land Office (GLO) survey plats “consistently recorded pecan trees on
the floodplain,” while back towards the bluffs on the denser soils were towering, old-growth
walnut, oak and hickory, the important fuel and construction woods for both the Indians and
13
The evidence for the ash grove is taken from notarial records (property descriptions) in the Village of
Chartres record collection in Brown and Dean, The Village of Chartres, for the years 1724-1765. This ash
grove, noted at times as “the hill of the ash grove” or “the ash grove by the coulee” appears in property
descriptions for the entire period of the French Regime, with the first mention occurring in 1726 (record K-23,
H169, p. 357 in Brown and Dean); as late as 1761 property is inventoried as running from “the ash grove” (see
record E-295, H424, p. 734 in Brown and Dean). The ash grove functioned as a western property marker, along
with the Mississippi River and “the prairie of the Mechigamea Indians.” The significance of this ash grove
being left untouched as a fuel source will be discussed in the next chapter.
97
French.14 The marshes, occurring near the ponds closer to the bluffs, were filled with prairie
cordgrass, also known as Slough Grass or Ripgut for its sharp-toothed leaves.15 Because of
the coarseness of cordgrass, forage animals will only eat it in the spring; however, in the
floodplain near Fort Chartres, cordgrass would have furnished dense protective cover for
waterfowl nests; it was also used for thatching and occasionally, for fuel. Waving in the
humid air in pure, gray-green stands as high as ten feet, cordgrass would have defined the
marshy areas. Clearer lands in the bottomland mosaic – the true prairies, the broad and
coveted ‘meadows’ of the French – had almost certainly been managed by fire.
Yet the prairie was not uniform. Some of the land supported a dense shrub growth, such
as hazel, which grew into coppices and thickets. Other areas had been burned clean of
vegetation. Still others held the mixed grasses of the true prairie – big bluestem, Indian, and
switchgrass, growing in clumps with deep root systems. Prairie plants such as the tough,
rhizomatous leadplant bound the earth (it was leadplant which so resisted the early wooden
plows of the white upland farmers and which was only effectively uprooted by the large,
wheeled, iron plow16 ). The grasses dried out in late summer and were easy to burn. The
smoky pall of smoldering, summer-dried grasses continued to be an observable phenomenon
as late as 1803, when William Clark on his way to the Missouri River with the Corps of
Discovery tried to take a reading with his sextant. He recorded the dimness of the air at the
14
Enumeration of trees in the American Bottom in the area around the first Fort Chartres is given in Edward B.
Jelks, Carl J. Ekberg, and Terrance J. Martin, Excavations at the Laurens Site: Probable Location of Fort de
Chartres I (Springfield: Illinois Historic Preservation Agency, 1989), p. 19.
15
Ibid; see also discussion of cordgrass (Spartina pectinata/Michauxiana) on early Illinois river floodplains in
Homer C. Sampson, “An Ecological Survey of the Prairie Vegetation of Illinois,” Bulletin of the Illinois
Laboratory of Natural History 13(16), 1921, pp. 523-577; Lewis M. Turner, “Grassland in the Floodplain of
Illinois Rivers,” American Midland Naturalist 15, 1934, pp. 770-780, especially p. 778.
16
Gordon G. Whitney, From Coastal Wilderness to Fruited Plain: A History of Environmental Change in
Temperate North America from 1500 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 255.
Whitney also points out that under the pressure of livestock grazing, prairie leadplant (Amorpha canascens) was
one of the significant “decreasers” (see p. 258). French livestock would thus have assisted in the conversion of
the tallgrass prairies.
98
mouth of the Kaskaskia River on November 28: “This morning being very smoky prevents
my being as accurate as I would wish.”17
The site of the three future Fort Chartres was watery, but not as lake-filled and streamcrossed as the Cahokia grant. Flowing across the land selected by De Boisbriant in 1719 was
the east-west stream that eventually became known as Prairie du Rocher Creek. Notarial
records indicate the building of mills on or near this stream; and its course down from the
bluffs – much more vigorous in 1720 than the deeply-eroded, sluggish trickle visible today –
was likely the route that cattle initially followed up to the common grazing lands on the till
plain. Whether De Boisbriant surveyed this area by water or by land in 1719, he would have
been struck by the evenness of the earth on the site that eventually held the first fort. One
imagines the soldiers in canoes and pirogues approaching the eastern shore of the Mississippi
and noting a large island lying parallel to the banks, land likely detached from the original
shore through a cut-off action of the river. Although there are no descriptions of this island, it
was probably heavily wooded, as was the Isle of the Holy Family where the Seminarians
settled at Cahokia; it would have offered protection for a landing.18 De Boisbriant was likely
able to gaze straight back from the river, through scattered, old-growth cottonwoods standing
upon the floodplain. There he may have noted a level, recently-burned, and relatively
vegetation-free meadow (prairie). Archaeological excavations of the Laurens Site, the first
wooden fort built by the French, have located it approximately one half to one mile inland
from the river shoreline near a small stream, perhaps the Coulee Deneau of later accounts.19
The Mississippi ran calmly here. On still, humid summer days, it stretched tight as a
17
William Clark, The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition August 30, 1803 – August 24, 1804 (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1986), p. 117.
18
Brown and Dean, The Village of Chartres, preface, p. ix.
19
See map of Laurens site and its relation to the third stone Fort Chartres, yet standing (rebuilt) on its original
location, in Jelks et al, Excavations at the Laurens Site, p. 17.
99
drumskin to the western shore. In the distance De Boisbriant and his men would have noted
the great rocky cliffs offering protection from surprise attack. Were there signs on that initial
exploring mission that De Boisbriant’s men would construct the first fort Chartres on Illinois
Indian village sites?
Anecdotal, undocumented evidence presented in one early Illinois history suggests that
the first fort was built on the site of an old fur warehouse or “blockhouse,” the crude storage
facility erected by the French merchant Crozat, who had held developmental rights to the
Illinois Country prior to 1718, when his venture failed.20 Observations made in 1927 noted
“fine forest trees all along the ridge of alluvial land where the old fort stood,” suggesting that
the site was indeed on higher ground. Behind this ridge lay a “bayou of considerable
width...extending parallel to the foot of the bluffs some two or three miles.”21 A footpath,
likely an Indian trail, may have run along the base of the bluffs to the Kaskaskia settlement.
This trail would expand through use to become the Chemin du Roi, rising to the top of the
bluffs beyond Fort Chartres and running all the way on the uplands to Cahokia. Thus the site
Boisbriant selected was already impacted and altered by human occupation. If he were drawn
to build on ground revealing evidence of a prior structure, then it is also true that Crozat – if
he did build a warehouse here – may have been drawn to land imprinted through many
generations of human use. The significance of this for French agriculture around Fort
Chartres is often overlooked. Equally important are the pacific nature and downriver trading
history of the Mechigamea Indians.
20
See George W. Smith, History of Illinois, p. 120: “Tradition insists that there was a sort of warehouse or
blockhouse at this place...” For the most detailed account of the Crozat venture and the subsequent involvement
of the Scottish speculator John Law, see Marcel Giraud, A History of French Louisiana, Vol Two: Years of
Transition, 1715-1717, transl. by Brian Pearce (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993 (1958),
pp. 38-49. Giraud presents Crozat in a more favorable light, stressing his realism and business acumen about
the necessity of support and fortification in the Louisiana colonies.
21
Ibid., p. 119.
100
The Fort Chartres Prairies
One of the most strikingly consistent themes in all early accounts of the American
Bottom, especially in the lands lying between Fort Chartres and Kaskaskia, is the fertility of
the soil, also sometimes conflated with ease of working the soil. From Father Louis
Hennepin in 1698 (who appended Joliet’s observations of 1674 to his own account) to
Timothy Flint in 1828, observers have written of the soils of the Illinois country often in
near- hyperbolic terms. Hennepin (citing Joliet) felt that “Those who shall settle themselves
there, need not be oblig’d, as we are here, to bestow Ten Years labour for felling down the
Trees, and grubbing up the land...for the Ground is ready for the Plough in that fortunate
Country....”22
The French observer Le Page du Pratz at mid-eighteenth century said of the
French at the Illinois, “...they grow wheat, rye, and other like grain, for the sowing of which
you need only to turn the earth in the slightest manner....”23 A remarkable observation also
came from the British soldier Robert Kirk, ascending the Mississippi in 1765: “The Indians
who are badly skilled in agriculture, will from one bushel which they sow, have an increase
of at least one hundred.”24 In 1812, the observer Timothy Flint maintained that “Parts of this
tract have been in cultivation with the exhausting crop of maize 100 years, without producing
apparently the slightest exhaustion of the soil. No description will convey an adequate idea of
22
Louis Hennepin and R.G. Thwaites, editor, A New Discovery of a Vast Country in America (Chicago: A.C.
McClurg & Co., 1903) cited in John White, Early Accounts, p. 27. See also Louis Hennepin, A Description of
Louisiana, transl. by John Gilmeary Shea (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, Inc., 1966), p. 150: “...we are
convinced that the soil is capable of producing all kinds of fruits, herbs, and grain, and in greater abundance
than the best lands of Europe.”
23
Le Page du Pratz, A History of Louisiana, or of the Western Parts of Virginia and Carolina: Containing a
Description of the Countries that lye on both Sides of the River Mississippi: With An Account of the Settlements,
Inhabitants, Soil, Climate, and Products, Vol. II (London: T. Becket and P.A. De Hondt, 1763), p. 302.
24
Through So Many Dangers: The Memoirs and Adventures of Robert Kirk, Late of the Royal Highland
Regiment, edited by Ian McCulloch and Timothy Todish (New York: Purple Mountain Press, 2004), p. 104.
101
the power of vegetation….”25 He further described the area as a “plain of exhaustless
fertility.”26 These early observers were no doubt thinking of the worn-out soils of Europe as
they viewed the rich black alluvial floodplain along the Mississippi. So black was the earth,
in fact, that Hennepin noted “it looks as if it had been already manur’d.”27 Even historians
writing about the Illinois colonies have accepted these views. For instance, the historian of
French Louisiana, Marcel Giraud, wrote in 1958, “The soil, flat and fertile, could produce
crops without preliminary clearance.”28 Yet it is misleading to view the soils of all the French
settlements as the same.
By 1723, only four years after the construction of Fort Chartres was begun, Diron
D’Artaguiette made an inspection journey for the Company of the Indies. He writes of the
French settlement area in general, “This soil is very rich and fertile. It has never yet failed to
produce anything which is planted in it.”29 In describing the relationships of dwellings in the
Fort Chartres area, D’Artaguiette mentions a church outside the fort and “some dwellings a
half league lower down on the same side as well as half a league above.”30 The French
farmers around the fort produced a more “diffuse” and strung-out settlement pattern than at
Kaskaskia.31 There may have been good reasons for that. By 1723, the land around the fort
had been granted to French settlers and soldiers, homes had been constructed, and agriculture
was underway. Notarial records from the Parish of St. Anne’s, adjacent to the fort, confirm
this. By 1724, a house “situated about fifteen feet from the wake” [of the Mississippi River]
25
Timothy Flint, A Condensed Geography and History of the Western States, or the Mississippi Valley, Vol. II
(Gainesville, Florida: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1970 (1828)), p. 118.
26
Ibid.
27
Louis Hennepin and R.G. Thwaites, A New Discovery, cited in John White, Early Accounts, p. 24.
28
Marcel Giraud, A History of French Louisiana, Vol. Two, p. 459.
29
Journal of Diron D’Artaguiette, in Newton Mereness, Travels in the American Colonies (New York:
Antiquarian Press, 1961), p. 74.
30
Journal of Diron D’Artaguiette, in Mereness, p. 69.
31
This perception comes from Carl J. Ekberg’s analysis of land grants in French Roots, p. 79.
102
and about to be carried off, was inventoried for its heirs. Located on two arpents of land that
began at the shore of the river, this property by 1724 already supported eight hogs, twenty
hens and twenty chicks.32 Home and lot sales in the vicinity of the fort for the years 1724-25
specify “uncultivated lands” and “the crop,” or payment of “seven hundred pounds of flour”
as an asking price. One property in 1725 sold for “a canoe of cotton wood...and further four
hundred pounds of flour.”33 The earliest extant notarial document from the Fort Chartres
area is possibly from 1718-1719. Extensively damaged, it appears to be an agreement for a
tenant to rent out and farm a tract of land near a “Fort.” The lease period is for three years,
and expected returns are such that the rent is listed as “thirty-six minots of wheat” and “forty
minots of maize.”34 While there is no direct account of agriculture in the prairie lands around
Fort Chartres, De Boisbriant’s 1720 description of taking up the prairie at the Kaskaskia
settlement is illuminating: “...clearing of the land is easy with Negroes. The prairie sod is
taken up with a mattock, after which the land is easy to work. Several inhabitants plow it
with one horse.”35
The historian of French agriculture in the American Bottom, Carl J. Ekberg, points out
that the mattock [pinoche] could not have been that exceptionally easy to use, since some
observers at Kaskaskia noted that only a “quarter league of fields are being cultivated.”36
The slight evidence for early agricultural practices around Fort Chartres suggests the planting
of wheat and maize occurred fairly rapidly. One key aspect is that despite the mention of
cleared land, crops, flour, and domestic animals in the notarial records, it is unlikely there
32
See Brown and Dean, The Village of Chartres, Record K-6 (H145), p. 341-342.
See records K-7 (H146), K-10 (H161) and K-11 (H163) in Brown and Dean, The Village of Chartres, p. 345347.
34
See record K-341, in Brown and Dean, The Village of Chartres, p. 806.
35
Memorial of De Boisbriant, cited in Carl J. Ekberg, French Roots, p. 177.
36
Monsieur Lallement, cited in Ekberg, French Roots, p. 177.
33
103
were African slaves in the Chartres area until after the arrival of Philippe Renault in 1722-23.
Renault, a Parisian banker who led a contingent of miners and the first Caribbean slaves to
the Illinois country to establish lead-mining, received a land grant from De Boisbriant in
1723. This concession became the small, marshy settlement of St. Philippe.37 Without slave
labor to clear densely-rooted prairie lands around Fort Chartres, agriculture should have been
fledgling for at least the first few years. In addition, a severe flood of the Mississippi River in
1722, exacerbated by a violent hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico, created much feverish
sickness all along the river. In New Orleans, a “malignant fever carried off scores of
inhabitants,” while to the north in the Illinois Country, the flood also caused “fever and
sickness.”38 Yet despite the absence of slaves in the initial years and this epidemic, the land
around Fort Chartres was being improved: crops were in. One inference is that the French
were plowing on previously farmed lands. The “strung out” nature of the French longlot
farms suggests a discretionary selection of land that looked the easiest to put under
cultivation. The mosaic of land around the fort, with some arpents fully plowed and
producing intermixed with scrub land and woods, is reminiscent of protohistoric Indian
farming practices. Productive maize fields lay scattered among abandoned, exhausted fields
in a calculated rotation.39
French farming practices in the bottomlands offer clues to the early success of cerealgrain agriculture. The French plow, the heavy, wheeled charrue, was in use at Kaskaskia by
37
Carl J. Ekberg, French Roots, p. 79.
J.H. Schlarman, From Quebec to New Orleans: The Story of the French in America (Belleville, Illinois: The
Buechler Publishing Company, 1930), p. 209-210.
39
The mosaic pattern of maize fields interspersed with “many abandoned fields” in alluvial canebrakes has been
specifically documented in historical description for the southeastern Indians: Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and
Shawnee. See William I. Woods, “Maize Agriculture and the Late Prehistoric: A Characterization of Settlement
Location Strategies,” in Emergent Horticultural Economies of the Eastern Woodlands, ed. William F. Keegan,
Center for Archaeological Investigations, Occasional Paper No. 7 (Southern Illinois University, 1987), p.277.
38
104
1711, because Andrew Penicaut remarked on its use by the Kaskaskia Indians.40 Even in the
embryonic agricultural settlement growing up around Fort Chartres, the charrue and a few
oxen would have been necessary. Such was the value of oxen on these earliest grants that a
lease agreement lays out specific terms for recompense should an ox die by any means but
“war or lightning.”41 Descriptions of the French working their land emphasize the holdover
of Old World peasant and French Canadian practices. One archaeologist specializing in
French Kaskaskia has characterized French farming tools as “primitive.”42 Both the charrue
and the harrow were made of wood, the harrow an improvement over the first scratch plows,
antlers or limbs from trees dragged over the ground upside down to break up the heavy
surface clods. Harrows manufactured at the Illinois were likely made of seasoned hickory,
the hardest wood. Historians and archaeologists have drawn connections between the French
Illinois farming implements and those in use for centuries in early modern Europe.43
Canadian historians have linked the charrue to the kind of soil found in northwest France,
“deep and wet...requiring a heavy, wheeled plough that could ridge the fields for drainage
and expose the soil for drying.”44 The charrue had a fixed moldboard that created a ridged
field – “a rise of one foot in a width of about nine, providing an element of drainage.”45
The natural ridging created by the charrue in the soil of Illinois bottomlands contributed to
the success of French agriculture there, but it was not the only factor. Nor is the periodic
flooding and enrichment of the fields by the Mississippi to answer for how quickly the area
40
J.H.Schlarman, From Quebec to New Orleans, p. 155.
See record K-341 in Brown and Dean, The Village of Chartres, p. 807.
42
Natalia Maree Belting, Kaskaskia Under the French Regime (New Orleans: Polyanthos, 1975), p. 53
43
See illustrations of French farming tools in Belting, p. 55, drawn from Louis Liger, La nouvelle maison
rustique, ou, Économie generale de tous les biens de campagne : la maniere de les entretenir & de les
multiplier (A Paris: Chez la veuve Prudhomme..., 1736).
44
Dale Miquelon, New France: 1701—1744 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1987), p. 200, cited in R.F.
Neill, The End of National Policy: Very Long Run Economic Factors in Canadian Economic Development
(Prince Edward Island: University of Prince Edward Island, 2004).
45
Ibid.
41
105
around Fort Chartres yielded surplus crops – an explanation offered by virtually all
observers. Archaeologists and geologists specializing in Indian subsistence have discussed
Indian farming practices from the Middle Mississippian (approximately 1000 – 1300 A.D.)
onward in terms of a highly selective and informed agriculture. Because Indian groups
farming the bottomlands as part of a subsistence mosaic used only hand tools to work the
soil, they increased their crop yields by other means. Three of the most important were the
creation of ridges for drainage, field rotation and a combination of outfield-infield
agriculture, and expert knowledge of kinds of soils. Archaeology of the American Bottom
focusing on the botanical record identifies “commonalities...as well as much variability” in
the kinds of crops grown by prehistoric and protohistoric Indians. The diversity alone of
cultigens routinely planted by Mississippian peoples suggests that soils and growing
conditions in this single strip of alluvial soil in the American Bottom encouraged
experimentation. Site explorations have identified “a myriad of domesticated and semidomesticated crops.” Such a list includes maize, common bean, squash, gourd, sunflower,
sumpweed, tobacco, and many small starchy seeds such as chenopod, maygrass, erect
knotweed, and little barley. Grain amaranth may also have been included as a late-introduced
cultigen.46 These crops were cultivated and harvested on specifically-selected soils, with
preference given to a rare soil type identified as Wakeland: “Only one soil series, Wakeland
silt loam, was found to exhibit all the essential requirements and it was present only in
isolated patches.” Wakeland is but one of twelve kinds of soils identified as occurring in the
46
Neal H. Lopinot, “Spatial and Temporal Variability in Mississippian Subsistence: The Archaeobotanical
Record,” in Late Prehistoric Agriculture: Observations from the Midwest, Studies in Illinois Archaeology No. 8,
ed. by William I. Woods (Springfield: Illinois Historic Preservation Agency, 1992), p. 46.
106
American Bottom, with varying combinations of certain critical variables: texture, chemical
reaction, nutrient content, and drainage – including flooding and high water tables.47
While archaeologists have completed most site studies in the northern area of the
American Bottom, similar conditions for placement of large Indian fields occur in the Fort
Chartres area. Indian agriculturists selected rich bottomland soils for their fields, and they
practiced outfield-infield agriculture, in which field selection and development “was not
automatic.” The best soils were not contiguous and actually, have been characterized by
archaeologists as “circumscribed.”48 It is important to recognize the highly selective quality
of Indian agriculture, because historic accounts imply that all soils in the bottomlands were
fertile and accessible, scarcely needing to be turned over. In actuality, the indications are
strong for a consistently careful selection and improvement of scattered fields. Indian
farmers mixed ashes into their cleared earth; they practiced field rotation; and they lived in
villages on the higher ridges of sandy soil back from the floodplain. Infield gardens
surrounded their farmsteads, while large, dispersed, carefully-identified and chosen fields
were worked as common land for crops. Most important, however, was the continuous use
of such discretely-selected land: “Historic [Indian] farmers in the Midwest realized quite
early that crops grew better within areas of prehistoric occupation sites.”49 Researchers have
found indications that prehistoric farmers also had learned to recognize “culturally enriched
soils.”50
Despite the abandonment of the fields in the American Bottom area by late Mississippian
Indians – a confirmed out-migration to upland fields by 1550 likely caused by erosion, soil
47
William I. Woods, “Maize Agriculture,” p. 283.
William I. Woods, “Maize Agriculture,” p. 280.
49
William I. Woods, “Maize Agriculture,” p. 281.
50
Ibid.
48
107
exhaustion, and deforestation – evidence exits that historic Indians re-occupied the Fort
Chartres area. A detailed 1697 map by Louis de la Porte de Louvigny, based on a memoir
and accounts of explorations to the Illinois Country, shows two Tamaroa Indian villages side
by side in the area of the future Fort Chartres. Mechigamea Indians were shown living in a
village across the Mississippi.51 It is likely that Tamaroa and perhaps, Mechigamea Indians,
were farming maize fields in the Fort Chartres area floodplain. Longterm human occupation
of the Chartres floodplain would result in culturally-enriched soils there, soils containing
chemicals like lime and salt from butchering, food preparation and disposal, human waste,
calcium from burial of animals and humans, sharpening flakes, and ashes and carbonized
wood from fires. The first successful effort to locate the original Fort Chartres, for instance,
was made by a soil scientist who identified increased levels of calcium, phosphorous, and
hydronium in the perimeters of the original fort site. A patch of inland earth yielded distinct
evidence of human occupancy; this particular human structure had existed for only five years
before being abandoned and rebuilt. Yet significant soil changes had occurred, traces clear
enough to be identified 270 years later!52
What are the implications for soil selection and enrichment on the Fort Chartres
concession? Arriving French settlers in 1719-1720, whose first priority was the building of a
wooden fort and chapel, would have found it onerous and probably, dangerously physically
debilitating to have worked and improved earth on which no domestic crops had ever been
grown. A description of using a wooden breaking plow on freshly-cleared land in western
Indiana, taken from oral interviews with pioneers who used such plows, reveals a formidable
51
Sara Jones Tucker, Indian Villages of the Illinois Country, Vol. 2, Scientific Papers, Illinois State Museum,
Part 1, Atlas (Springfield, Illinois: Illinois State Museum, 1942 and 1975), Plate XIV.
52
William I. Woods, “Soil Chemical Investigations in Illinois Archaeology: Two Example Studies,” American
Chemical Society, 1984, p. 70.
108
toll on both animals and humans. Witnesses from the early nineteenth century describe the
opening of never-before-cultivated earth with a team of powerful horses, Clydesdales and
Percherons. Despite the straining strength of these enormous draft animals, the team “could
only pull a plow once acrossed the field before they needed to rest.”53 The ease with which
the French farmers around Fort Chartres with a single team of oxen (or often, a single
animal) could put a considerable amount of common field land into cultivation within the
first few years is suggestive. These farmers were employing oxen, “fastened together by the
horns, by means of a flat piece of wood, not as later on yokes was customary with the
English.”54 French farmers, drawing on a European tradition, likely used the hard, durable
heartwood of hop hornbeam to fashion these yokes. Varieties of hop hornbeam were so
preferred in Europe that the wood acquired the name “yoke-elm.” Hop hornbeam was used in
French Canada for sled runners and tool handles of all kinds. Master carpenters of the
Illinois Country, working at first out of French Kaskaskia and then the fort by 1726 knew the
value and use of a variety of woods; notarial records specify, for instance, “planks” and
“boards” of white oak or walnut as portions of selling prices.55 A 1726 contract for building
a barn specifies the frame to be built “of walnut, of sassafras, or of mulberry.”56 Naturally
abundant in the Illinois Country, the small hop hornbeam was also a source of food for
white-tailed deer, who peeled off its feathery bark; the drooping clusters of hop hornbeam
53
Merle C. Rummel, The Four Mile (Boston, Indiana, 1998), n.p.
Glimpses of Prairie du Rocher, Its Past and Present 1722-1942 (Belleville, Illinois: Buechler Printing Co.,
1942), p. 4; Natalia Belting, Kaskaskia Under the French Regime, p. 54; see also discussion of French oxen
and charrues in Carl J. Ekberg, French Roots, pp. 178-180. Ekberg contrasts the English and American views of
French agriculture as “defective” or “non-progressive” with the actual tillage habits using oxen teams, charrues,
and common lands. Evidence exists from estate inventories of the French settlers that “virtually every
substantial habitant in the Illinois Country owned a team of oxen and a charrue.” (p. 179).
55
See, for instance, record K-380 in Brown and Dean, The Village of Chartres, p. 851- 852.
56
Record K-404 in Brown and Dean, p. 884.
54
109
seeds furnished winter food for ruffed grouse and gray squirrels.57 As the French population
grew, settlers began to draw upon the diverse resources of the bottomlands and also, the
upland till plain, hauling some of their wood from “the hills.” Before switching to shingling,
they thatched their barns with “straw” (likely dried cordgrass), burned shagbark hickory for
fuel, and planed “sawn boards” of red mulberry for posts, pickets, and palings, hop hornbeam
for tool handles and yokes, and most often, cottonwood and walnut for river craft and
furniture. Diron D’Artaguiette noted in 1723 that the “wood of the mulberry tree lasts for
thirty years in the ground, without rotting.”58 One important result of early wheat and maize
yields was expansion into artisanal crafts, the building of horse and windmills – and
increased hunting and trapping forays.
It is true that the alluvial silt of the floodplain was enriched through annual flooding
downstream from the mud-laden Missouri; but that uni-causal explanation of French
agricultural success obscures an intricate history. Indians who had the eye for the best soils,
who worked the black, heavy, redolent silt in ragged-edged fields, may also have been using
their unfenced and unprotected lands as a form of bait. Field margins drifted into the
understory of tangled brush and woods. From that adjacency streamed small mammal
populations eager for grain.59 Indians hunted the margins, gleaning mice, rabbits, squirrels,
and voles. They had made calculated decisions to embed maize fields in a fringe of timber
margin and woods – leading to a European perception of haphazard, random usage. In subtle
and often oblique ways, the prehistoric and historic Indian cultures of the bottomlands were
working the ecological system. Even when settlement spread up onto the bluffs and upland
57
Robert H. Mohlenbrock, Forest Trees of Illinois (Department of Conservation, Division of Forestry: State of
Illinois, 1975), p. 101; see also Thomas D. Morgan, "Tree of the Month: Hop Hornbeam" in The Prairie Falcon
Vol. 31 (4), December 2002.
58
Journal of Diron D’Artaguiette, in Mereness, Travels, p. 74.
59
Neal H. Lopinot, “Spatial and Temporal Variability,” p. 53.
110
till plains, those settlements, while “never as numerous as in the American Bottom,”
continued to be “strongly correlated with Wakeland soils.”60
The deliberate, patchwork field mosaic of the Chartres floodplain, then, initially attracted
French farmers in certain patterns. Increases in population resulted in the clearing of more
land, the use of common fields, the drying out of wet surface soils, and a different kind of
selective use of resources. At least one ecologist has made connections between the hop
hornbeam and beaver colonies.61 Scores of songbird populations feasted annually on red
mulberry fruit. Environmental studies of colonial resource use in the eastern seaboard often
focus on the theme of over-exploitation and wanton waste, of the impact of sheer abundance
on incoming Europeans whose pinched lives in cities or on exhausted rural lands drove them
west.62 These themes are tied to other themes of the “unstoppable tide” of settlement.
Because the numbers of French along the Mississippi floodplain remained low, historians
have not focused on immediate and ongoing changes in the tripartite ecosystem of their
world.63 However, ecology also describes the introduction of new species and invasives as
well as the depletion and extirpation of native ones. These twin processes were set in motion
with the arrival in the Illinois of livestock, particularly, hogs.64
60
William I. Woods and George R. Holley, “Upland Mississippian Settlement in the American Bottom
Region,” in Cahokia and the Hinterlands: Middle Mississippian Cultures of the Midwest, ed. by Thomas E.
Emerson and R. Barry Lewis (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), p. 60.
61
Thomas D. Morgan, “Tree of the Month: Hop Hornbeam,” in The Prairie Falcon.
62
Such themes are especially prevalent in William Cronon, Changes in the Land (1983), and Carolyn Merchant,
Ecological Revolutions: nature, gender, and science in New England (1989).
63
A comparison of the population of French Louisbourg and the entire Illinois Country in 1752 shows a striking
disparity: Louisbourg “was occupied by 1,500 military personnel, 674 fishermen, 437 engages and other
servants, and 1,349 residents.” The Illinois Country claimed “151 soldiers, 670 habitants or farmers, 401 black
slaves, and 133 native Indian slaves.” In David Keene, “Fort de Chartres: Archaeology in the Illinois Country,”
French Colonial Archaeology: The Illinois Country and the Western Great Lakes, ed. by John Walthall
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), p. 38.
64
There is a strong literature on the introduction of European swine to New World locales. Important works
include two studies by Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900 –
1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), and Germs, Seeds, & Animals: Studies in Ecological
History (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1994). Crosby points out the high adaptability of omnivorous hogs and
111
Domestic pigs may have arrived in the Illinois via Catholic missions as early as the 1690’s
(the missions on the Illinois River, for instance). In 1712, Father Marest described Indians
raising chickens and pigs at the Kaskaskia Mission.65 Hogs, chickens, and horned cattle
naturally migrated to the Chartres establishment, and by 1725 hogs are showing up in
notarial records. One property included “three pigsties fenced with posts and thatched...four
sows, eighteen medium pigs, twenty hens and roosters….”66 Another entry, also in 1725,
included “22 pigs, half male and half female” and “40 hens.”67 Evidence taken from the
listing of animals on French censuses shows that swine “multiplied faster than any other
animals.” Between 1732 and 1752 for French Illinois as a whole, they increased from 563 to
1682.68 These counts do not include hogs raised by Indians. It is likely that before maize
(Indian corn) production became steady enough to ensure a supplemental food base, hogs
were turned loose to forage in the floodplain. (Indians who owned hogs probably rarely fed
them with reserves of corn but let them forage). Hogs particularly consumed amaranth
(pigweed), wild onions, the water lily root called macoupin, and perhaps “some varieties of
root plants that all but disappeared from the Illinois country.”69 The variety in hog diet –
and the abundance – was certainly a factor in hog fertility. Hogs also ate many varieties of
acorns and nuts raining down from old-growth, prolifically-producing trees. The natural oils
in the abundant nuts of the southern Illinois region, especially sweet pignut hickory, were
states, “The impact of the animals the Europeans brought with them to the Americas transformed whole
ecosystems.” See Germs, Seeds, & Animals, p. 55. See also William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians,
Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), pp. 135 – 137. Both Crosby
and Cronon term hogs the “weed animals” for their reproductive and disseminating behaviors.
65
See Marest letter in Jesuit Relations, Vol. 66, p. 257, cited in John A. Walthall et al, “Woman Chief’s
Village: An Illini Winter Hunting Camp,” in Calumet & Fleur-de-Lys: Archaeology of Indian and French
Contact in the Midcontinent ed. by John A. Walthall and Thomas E. Emerson (Washington: Smithsonian
Institution Press, 1992), p. 145.
66
See Record K-376 in Brown and Dean, The Village of Chartres, p. 846.
67
Record K-388, Brown and Dean, p. 868.
68
Numbers of swine provided in Carl J. Ekberg, French Roots, p. 206-207.
69
Raymond Hauser, “The Ethnohistory of the Illinois Indian Tribe, 1673-1832,” Ph.D. dissertation, Northern
Illinois University, 1973 (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1973), p. 99.
112
prized by Indians, French, and hogs alike. These oils imparted to freshly-butchered and
smoked hog meat a memorable, oily sweetness. Yet ripe nuts coat the ground only during a
precise interval each year. The lure of milky, developing corn ears over an entire growing
season was much greater.
To keep animals out of their fields, the French in the Chartres area resorted to fencing in a
long riverine strip of common pasture land that also included some wooded areas.
Eventually, once the population grew large enough, fences and gates were built around the
arable fields. After the harvests, the gates were opened and animals permitted in to graze the
stubble.70 French owners of livestock used both ear-cropping and branding as a way to
identify their animals.71 There is no evidence for what Mechigamea Indians living close to
Fort Chartres did with their livestock. Since they were occupying a shoreline grant that
included a prairie named for them, their pigs may have been permitted to roam freely.
Unlike the documented history of colonist-Indian conflict over roaming animals on the
eastern seaboard, there is no clear record of continuing French-Indian squabbles over food
resources for foraging livestock or animals invading and destroying planted fields. One
reason for this is French adherence to the Coutume de Paris, the operant legal system
transported from France. The Coutume was not often changed by exigencies in the New
World. No new laws, rulings, or court-established precedents could easily evolve in a
colonial outpost, thus leaving a record for future examination but also, allowing groups of
peoples to change the social and legal structure – most especially, Indians. Early English
laws in the Virginia colony, for example, stated that “Any Englishman taking up land near
Indian fields must help build fences around the fields to protect Indian crops from the
70
71
Carl J. Ekberg, French Roots, pp. 80-81 and 206-207.
Ekberg, p. 208.
113
settlers’ hogs and cattle.” Such rulings facilitated the adaptation of hogs by Virginia Indian
tribes; by the 1660’s, the Weacock, Meherrin, and Nottoway Indians were all raising hogs,
and by 1692, the Nottoway were selling them.72 Other studies of Narrangansett Indians, for
example, pinpoint “heated conflicts.” Still, one historian believes that not all Indians readily
adapted the hog: “Indians had never before seen the fecund and destructive beasts that now
trampled and ate their crops.” The Shawomets and Pawtuxents began fencing their corn
fields, but hogs took to the woods. This activity may have functioned as a “dynamic force of
territorial expansion” in the eastern seaboard as hogs “funneled out in advance of [growing]
English colonies.”73 The tri-partite environment of floodplain, bluffs, and upland prairies of
the Illinois, however, did not allow hogs, either French or Indian, to “funnel out”
expansively. Nor could Indians use an existing legal system to protect their fields.
The trouble on the Cahokia grant with French livestock, contributing to the “Cahokia
revolt” in the early 1730’s, is revealed in letters of the Seminarian priests.74 In those
instances, French livestock invaded Indian land. Indian animals mingling with domesticated
French stock or foraging in French fields comprises a different pattern, one not welldocumented.75 Oblique references to friction do occur, however. In 1733, the colonizer and
governor of Louisiana, Jean Baptiste le Moyne, the Sieur de Bienville, wrote of the FrenchIndian relations in Louisiana as a whole that proximity of Indian villages to French villages
72
Lewis R. Binford, “An Ethnohistory of the Nottoway, Meherrin, and Weacock Indians of Southeastern
Virginia,” Ethnohistory, Vol. 14 (3/4), Summer, 1967, pp. 146, 163, and 178.
73
See this interesting conclusion in Joshua Micah Marshall, “A Melancholy People”: Anglo-Indian Relations
in Early Warwick, Rhode Island 1642 – 1675,” The New England Quarterly, Vol. 68 (3), September, 1995, pp.
407- 409.
74
See Chapter Two for an overview of the Cahokia revolt.
75
For a careful study of escalating friction between eastern colonists and Indians over livestock, an escalation
that led to King Philip’s War in 1676, see Virginia DeJohn Anderson, “King Philip’s Herds: Indians, Colonists,
and the Problem of Livestock in Early New England,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., Vol. 51 (4),
October, 1994, pp. 601– 624.” See also Anderson’s recent study of colonial livestock, Creatures of Empire:
How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
114
“often causes dangerous disputes.”76 In the 1750’s, Commander Macarty at Fort Chartres
makes reference to Indians killing French pigs and horned cattle “from time to time.”77 The
French living at Chartres complained much more vocally about Indian dogs. In the early
1750’s, the traveler Bossu told some departing Mechigamea and Cahokia Indians, “It is good
you are leaving. Consider the damage that the dogs of your village have done to the livestock
belonging to the French settlers.” Bossu mentions that hungry dogs killed livestock during
food shortages and describes the “dogs of the Illinois,” as “half wolf.”78 A few years later
when Bossu was visiting the Peoria, he shared a feast with them that included “maple sap,
persimmon bread, bear paws, beaver tails....” as well as “dog, corn meal, and maple syrup.”79
Indians raised dogs – used primarily as feast meat – as a form of livestock. French
perceptions that Indians killed and ate dogs when provisions were low, in an opportunistic
and random fashion, is probably incorrect. Yet dogs and hogs did apparently roam freely in
many areas of the floodplain, while black horned cattle and horses grazed on common land
on both the floodplain and up on the bluffs. The grazing of Kaskaskia cattle and horses on
islands and a peninsula in the Mississippi echoes the Eastern seaboard practice of
“hogreeves,” where hogs were let loose on islands and “reeves [reefs].”80 The ability of hogs
to “go feral” in a short period of time contributed to the problems with resource exploitation
in the bottomlands. While Indians and French alike prized hogs because of their
independence, hog behavior in the wild seriously impacted the environment. Descriptions of
feral hogs from observations made as early as 1830 include large herds of animals acting in
76
Bienville, “Louisiana,” May 15, 1733, Mississippi Provincial Archives, Vol. I (Jackson, Mississippi: Press of
the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, 1927), p. 201. Also see Raymond Hauser, “The
Ethnohistory of the Illinois Indians,” pp. 263-264.
77
Macarty to Vaudreuil, January, 1952, in Pease, Illinois on The Eve, p. 451.
78
Bossu, Travels, p. 81 and 81, n. 9, cited in Raymond Hauser, “The Ethnohistory of the Illinois Indian Tribe,”
p. 264.
79
Bossu, Travels, p. 108, cited in Hauser, “The Ethnohistory,” p. 116.
80
See Virginia DeJohn Anderson, Creatures of Empire, p. 160.
115
concert to “shake down” hazel nuts; some animals climbed and bent trees, breaking them.
Hogs also left deep, rutted trails in the earth: “The hazel thickets on the prairies were often
threaded by numerous trails....” In cold months, hogs created large nests from fallen oak
leaves, seemingly preferring the oldest, broadest-leaved trees. High mounds of piled,
sleeping animals lay under a blanket of oak leaves actually fetched by a series of hogs each
carrying a mouthful. The churning, pawing, and rooting activity in building these oak-leaf
nests, described as “twenty inches high and twelve to twenty feet across,” disturbed the root
systems of trees.81 Finally, hog consumption of acorns and other mast deprived oak trees of
their reproductive means. The loss of future oak trees to voracious hog appetite is discussed
particularly in studies of the disappearance of white oak, Quercus alba, the most prevalent
and successful oak of presettlement Illinois.82
Livestock depleted natural vegetation; yet in a reverse process, French and especially,
American landowners spread rich grazing grasses like Poa pratensis (bluegrass), timothy,
and tall and meadow fescue. The French wheat strains were also new to the area, introduced
by Jesuits at Kaskaskia in the early 1700’s. These processes resulted in ecological shifts that
may not have shown up as observable changes for years. For instance, waterfowl, land bird,
and white deer populations were affected by changes in native vegetation. The abundance
and variety of native floodplain plants developed as a result of alluvial flooding, of having to
spread into disturbed and marginal habitats. To combat annual, relentless inundation with
mud, these varieties compensated through the production of immense amounts of seed.83
81
See E.W. Hilgard, Botanical Features of the Prairies of Illinois in Ante-Railroad Days, manuscript on file at
the Illinois Historical Survey, no date, pp. 19-20.
82
See especially Marc D. Abrams, “Where Has All the White Oak Gone?” Bioscience, Vol. 53 (10), October,
2003.
83
Frances B. King, Plants, People, and Paleoecology, Scientific Papers Volume XX (Springfield: Illinois State
Museum, 1994), p. 29.
116
The preference of migrating waterfowl for the Mississippi flyway was partially built around
the copious, heavily-laden seedheads. Rich, stem-clustered, so bursting with seeds they
dragged low to the muddy earth, stands of common arrowhead or smartweed fed the
“millions of waterfowl” described so consistently by observers along the Mississippi.84
Bird and small mammal populations would have been affected as well when the
floodplain began to become firmer and drier, and when new species less bountiful and
productive began to creep into the grazed and mown wetlands. Land not under cultivation in
the floodplain was often wet in a distinctive way: full of appearing and disappearing springs,
seeps, sinkholes, and mud puddles. Earth could glisten and then dry out rapidly under
conditions often described as “droughty.” Land birds also depend in some instances on a
high moisture content of soils, a level correlated with areas of standing water. In the
bottomlands of Arkansas, forming with Illinois the Mississippi Alluvial Valley (MAV),
moist forest habitats and soils have been shown to support high numbers of insects and
invertebrate species.85 These form significant percentages of some songbird diets, especially
warblers, whose food source was reduced when bottomlands began to dry out. Conversely,
when white-tailed deer learned to browse corn and other row crops, foraging in the wider and
wider cropland margins, their overall body weight probably increased. Deer become larger,
sometimes considerably larger, “where agricultural crops add significant amounts of
nutrients to their diets.” White-tailed deer spend more time feeding than in any other
activity, and they would have eventually begun to incorporate seasonal crop availability into
84
John White, personal communication, May 17, 2004.
Winston P. Smith et al, “A Comparison of Breeding Bird Communities and Habitat Features Between OldGrowth and Second-Growth Bottomland Hardwood Forests,” in Bottomland Hardwoods of the Mississippi
Alluvial Valley: Characteristics and Management of Natural Function, Structure, and Composition, General
Technical Report SRS-42 (Fayetteville, Arkansas: United State Department of Agriculture, 2001), p. 78.
85
117
their forage patterns.86
There are implications of this (gradual) increase in size for the
deerskin trade, for deer agility and migration, and for deer reproduction. Thus, despite the
low numbers of French and Indians living along the floodplain in the first fifty years of the
eighteenth century, they had begun a process of measurable ecological change. And although
such change is instinct in any environment, the shifts in the floodplain ecology were ones that
would facilitate the massive wave of American settlement post 1790. In the lands around
Fort Chartres, French and Indian men and women set trajectories of resource use that would
eventually impact all peoples in the decades of keenest political unrest.
On initial grants of land, two-to-four arpents, located in dispersed areas around the fort,
French farmers began to produce grain. The first convoy to New Orleans loaded with wheat
and produce left the Illinois Country in 1721, although most of the grain likely came from the
Kaskaskia grant. The wheat was apparently noted as “being of a very fine quality.” Convoys
arrived in 1725 and 1729 as well, with the 1729 convoy reflecting a bumper crop year. Large
shipments of wheat and salted meat were soon supplying the lower Louisiana colonies.87
French farmers were but the latest in a long line of agriculturists who had discovered the
fecundity of certain soils of the floodplain. The importance of early agricultural success in
the Illinois Country is twofold: first, the record stands in stark contrast to other attempted
French settlements on the lower Mississippi; secondly, crop productivity in turn drew more
people to the area, much more rapidly than had occurred on the Cahokia grant twenty years
before. The presence of a fort with two companies of soldiers provided a local market for
wheat, Indian corn, and garden produce. Networks of supply and demand began to grow
86
Winston P. Smith and Patrick A. Zollner, “Seasonal Habitat Distribution of Swamp Rabbits, White-Tailed
Deer, and Small Mammals in Old Growth And Managed Bottomland Hardwood Forests,” in Bottomland
Hardwoods of the Mississippi Alluvial Valley, p. 94.
87
Nancy M. Miller Surrey, The Commerce of Louisiana During the French Regime: 1699-1763 (New York:
1916), p. 289.
118
naturally out of cultigen surplus. The connection between successful agriculture and its
corollary – burgeoning trade – is clearly demonstrated in the settlement pattern around Fort
Chartres. This connection has been recognized by Canadian historians of the French fur
trade, who have written of the deeply-entwined relationship between agriculture and trade.88
The relationship has not always been emphasized in the Illinois Country, where French
farmers have been studied as one specific socio-economic group and French traders,
voyageurs, and coureur de bois as another. But the two livelihoods were inextricably meshed.
Interestingly, an amateur local historian in the mid-nineteenth century suggested this same
connection: “A post established at Kaskaskia, was the means of creating a lively trade in
deer, buffalo, and bear meat, which were purchased for the transportation to New Orleans
and Mobile. This also stimulated the erection of Mills for the manufacture of flour....”89 By
the late 1740’s, some traders and voyageurs had established permanent farming bases in the
French communities. An inventory of a trader/voyageur who died in 1747 describes both
porcelain and glass trade goods for Indians and “1486 livres of wheat.”90
Such a reciprocity did not occur in French settlements to the south of the Illinois.
Historians who have examined the dismal record of the attempted French agricultural
settlement at Arkansas Post on the Arkansas River sketch a poignant picture of the
decimation of the French there. The Company of the Indies under the speculator John Law
had recruited and sent groups of French and Germans to lower Louisiana (the same company
88
See for instance, D.W. Moodie, “Agriculture and the Fur Trade,” in Old Trails and New Directions: Papers
of the Third North American Fur Trade Conference, ed. by Carol M. Judd and Arthur J. Ray (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1980).
89
E.J. Montague, “The History of Randolph County, Illinois, Including Old Kaskaskia Island,” 1859, copied by
Elisabeth Pinkerton Leighty (Sparta, Illinois, 1948), p. 10.
90
Inventory of Andre Chaverneau, Kaskaskia Mss. 47:9:30:1,cited in Margaret Kimball Brown, The Voyageur
in the Illinois Country: The Fur Trade’s Professional Boatman in Mid America, Center for French Colonial
Studies Extended Publication Series Number 3 (Naperville, Illinois: Center for French Colonial Studies, 2002),
p. 26.
119
was administering the upper Illinois). In late summer, 1721, as many as eighty French
engages (indentured servants) arrived to settle a small piece of open land called Little Prairie,
located 27 miles inland from the Mississippi on the Arkansas River.91 Here was the site of an
abandoned French trading post. Just as had happened two years earlier in the Chartres
settlement of Illinois, incoming French settlers chose land that showed traces of European
impact; some initial clearing of land had apparently already begun. This area of Arkansas,
fed by two major rivers but far enough inland to avoid the relentless flooding of the
Mississippi, would have been a morass of rampant vegetation, including some varieties of
trees that had become flood-adapted: water tupelo, water hickory, and water oak, for
example.92
These hardwood forests of the Mississippi Alluvial Valley supported “truly vast
volumes of high-quality timber” punctuated by some open prairie land.93 The prairies,
however, may not have been the same type as those found in southern Illinois. Arkansas in
particular has “Pleistocene sand dune barrens that [were once] endemic to the Mississippi
Alluvial Plain....”94 Such barrens are not the same as grassland prairies managed through
burning and would not have supported agriculture as easily. Yet early observers, most
especially the General Land Office surveyors of the early nineteenth century, often named all
open, grassy areas “prairies.” Perhaps the land the French tilled at Little Prairie along the
Arkansas River had not been opened to agriculture before, or had been unsuccessfully tilled
and then abandoned hundreds of years before. There is no clear way to know. The habitat of
this area, however, would have been a factor in French colonization.
91
Morris S. Arnold, Unequal Laws Unto a Savage Race: European Legal Traditions in Arkansas, 1686-1836
(Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1985), p. 5.
92
See Paul B. Hamel et al, “Chainsaws, Canebrakes, and Cotton Fields: Sober Thoughts on Silviculture for
Songbirds in Bottomland Forests,” in Bottomland Hardwoods of the Mississippi Alluvial Valley, Table 1, page
99.
93
Ibid., p. 98.
94
Tom Foti, Chief Ecologist, Arkansas Heritage Association, personal communication, May 4, 2004.
120
At a more southern latitude than the Illinois Country, insect and animal populations would
have differed: tortuous clouds of mosquitoes and biting flies shimmered in willow thickets
and hummed in stands of giant cane. Alligators may have hunted in the steaming
swamplands. (Audubon recorded alligators at the mouth of the Arkansas River in 1810). In
1673 Marquette noted of the Arkansas Indians (Quapaw), “They do not know what a beaver
is.”95 French accounts of the first contact with the Quapaw stress their usual attire as near
nudity in the humid Mississippi country as the river plunged south; Quapaw women wore a
single deerskin around their waist, while Quapaw men wore nothing.96 The intense heat of
these river lowlands was likely a factor in failed attempts at agriculture. Between 1727 and
1729, for instance, a priest assisting Father Paul du Poisson at the Quapaw Mission died of
sunstroke.97
Both Morris S. Arnold, who produced a study of European law in colonial Arkansas, and
the French historian Giraud have documented the miserable lives and fate of the first French
settlers at Arkansas Post. Of the 80 who arrived, only 50 remained by the following spring,
with a single surviving woman.98 Father Charlevoix, touring the Little Prairie in 1722, called
the French there “triste debris.” They were living in twenty rude cabins, had cleared only
three arpents of land, and had produced “an insignificant harvest.”99 The French response
was to release 20 of the engages from service and give them their own land to cultivate in
wheat and corn. The ability to raise grain was now seen as critical, since no French supply
95
Journal of Pierre Marquette, cited in John Upton Terrell, American Indian Almanac (New York: World
Publishing Company, 1961), p. 234.
96
W. David Baird, The Quapaws (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1989), p. 14; For the best account of
initial Quapaw-French encounters before 1700, see Morris Arnold, The Rumble of a Distant Drum: the
Quapaws and the Old World Newcomers, 1673-1804 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2000).
97
Samuel D. Dickinson, “Shamans, Priests, Preachers, and Pilgrims at Arkansas Post,” in Arkansas Before the
Americans, ed. by Hester A. Davis (Arkansas Archaeology Survey Research Series No. 40, 1991), p. 98.
98
Morris S. Arnold, Unequal Laws, p. 8-9.
99
Father Charlevoix, Journal D’Un Voyage Fait Par Ordre Du Roi Dans L’Amerique Septentriole (1744),
cited in Morris Arnold, Unequal Laws, p. 8-9.
121
ships were sailing up the Mississippi. A year later, the population was down to 30, with no
surviving women.100 The settlement also suffered flooding from the Arkansas River, but the
floods were not annual and did not require immediate protective measures.
From the beginning, efforts to make the Arkansas Post settlement “a stable agricultural
community” had completely failed. The Louisiana census of 1726 reported that “the
habitants were poor and lived only from the Indians’ hunting.”101 By 1746, only twelve
French families lived at Arkansas Post, engaging in hunting, curing meat, and trading tallow
and bear oil.102 This pattern of falling into trade with Indian villagers living near French
outposts and forts is confirmed by Daniel Usner in his study of lower Mississippi trade
networks: “Under continuing neglect from France, the inhabitants of the lower Mississippi
Valley were left to their own designs.”103 Those designs were based exclusively on
livelihood and seemingly did not involve much participation in the fur trade. Survival and
subsistence determined how Arkansas French settlers, unable to support themselves with
agriculture, would interact with Indians in their area.104 The trouble between the French and
Indians on the lower Mississippi comprises a clear and escalating record, best explored in
Daniel Usner’s study of a deteriorating economic system pressured from the east by English
deerskin hunters and traders. For a variety of complex reasons, the Indian tribes of the lower
Mississippi Valley – with the exception of the strongly French-allied Tunica and Quapaw –
100
Ibid.
Morris Arnold, Unequal Laws, p. 34.
102
Ibid.
103
Daniel H. Usner, Jr. Indians, Settlers, & Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi
Valley Before 1783 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), p. 81.
104
Morris Arnold in his study of colonial Arkansas has stated, “"It is safe to conclude that there were never
more than eight or ten real farmers at any one time at the Post in the colonial period.... Although the state of the
agricultural art, and the number of people engaged in it, certainly increased during the last decade of the
eighteenth century, John Treat, writing from the Post in 1805, notes even at that late date that ‘agriculture here
is yet in its infancy.…’" See Colonial Arkansas, 1686-1804: a social and cultural history (Fayetteville:
University of Arkansas Press, 1991), p. 61.
101
122
created a dangerous environment on the Mississippi River for Europeans. One of those
complex factors has to do with the absence of agricultural surplus and its core relationship to
successful and equitable trade.
123
The Trade Matrix at Fort Chartres
The first and second Fort de Chartres, both log structures eventually rotted away by the
riverine earth, attracted large numbers of people – French inhabitants and soldiers, diverse
Indians, and trappers and traders from New Orleans and Canada. Historians and
archaeologists have been drawn to the fort and its history, especially to the third fort: the
grandest and costliest French garrison in western North America.1 By the time this third fort
was constructed in the early 1750’s, of giant limestone blocks hewn from the bluffs, Fort
Chartres (usually shortened from Fort de Chartres) was dominating the French settlements as
the mercantile and military center. Indian villages, especially those closest to the fort, the
two Mechigamea settlements, appear in accounts and on maps, but only in reference to
location and population. In most accounts, the domiciled Indians of French Illinois simply
lived in adjacency. Yet an investigation of the fort-trade matrix reveals an evolution of
relationships and connections in which Illinois Indians were pivotal. In addition to becoming
major suppliers in the provisioning trade, Mechigamea Indians especially may have played a
role in trade relations with Indian nations across the Mississippi. Those tribes, the Osage,
Missouri, Ponca, Otoe, and Omaha, were visiting Fort Chartres by 1724 and likely, well
before. The ease of river travel and the way the many streams of the upper Mississippi
Valley watershed could ferry canoemen straight to Fort Chartres created a riverine trade
1
See, for example, Walter J. Saucier and Katherine Wagner Spineke, “Francois Saucier, Engineer of Fort de
Chartres, Illinois,” in Frenchmen and French Ways in the Mississippi Valley, ed. by John Francis McDermott
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1969). See also David Keene, “Fort de Chartres: Archaeology in the
Illinois Country,” in John A. Walthall, editor, French Colonial Archaeology: The Illinois Country and the
Western Great Lakes (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991). Keene makes the distinction between Fort
Chartres and the large French “fortress” at Louisbourg, in which the town itself was enclosed by the fort walls.
In the Illinois, settlements grew up outside the fort. The actual size of Fort Chartres was about six acres. The
historical fascination with this fort has even found its way into popular literature. See James F. Keefe, “The
Inventory of Fort Des Chartres, “in Muzzleloader, Volume XVIII, No. 6, January/February 1992, p. 45-46.
124
world perhaps equaled only by the French and Indian trade nexus in the Great Lakes and
Canadian subarctic.
If a bountiful agriculture around the fort and south to Kaskaskia grew from a blend of
factors, including Indian farming practices, alluvial flooding, and French animal husbandry,
the same kind of analysis holds true for the growth of trade here. Historians like Richard
White have emphasized the importance of French-Indian alliances built on gifts, trade
privileges, and political-judicial sanctions.2 The natural environment of French-Indian
Illinois was also critical, in that water routes allowed for the meetings of many diverse tribes.
The French river settlements nestled in an imaginary intersection at the point where Eastern
Woodland, Great Lakes, and Plains Indian cultures began to shade into each other and
overlap. Illinois Indians, riverine people, were related through trade and marriage alliances
to the Miami across the Grand Prairie in Indiana – a nation who never became canoemen.
The Osage of the Missouri highlands across the Mississippi to the west were consummate
horsemen and horse traders. The Fort Chartres matrix attracted Indians who traveled by
horse, by boat, and on foot; the differing life ways of these tribes would have created
demands for specific material trade items, thus shaping a complex mercantile hub that
influenced European settlements as far away as New Orleans and Montreal.
In the middle of a vigorous traffic in opportunistic trade, legal and illegal trade, fur, hide,
and provisioning trade, the Mechigamea Indians adapted to become suppliers of oil and meat.
Domiciled and living separately in their villages – and continually described that way in
French and European travel accounts – these Indians did not stay isolated. Their level of
2
See Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650 –
1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
125
daily interaction with French people and with other arriving Indians was likely very high.3
New ways are needed to detect their traces in a landscape where maps, notarial records, and
French correspondence routinely establish separatism. Today, although Fort Chartres has
been fully restored, a roadside plaque marks the site of St. Anne’s chapel in the long-gone
village of Chartres, and Prairie du Rocher retains French homes and iron crosses in the
cemetery, no marker exists to identify the probable site of the Mechigamea villages. This is a
fairly striking omission when compared to the amount of information available on the
prehistoric Cahokia moundbuilders, barely thirty miles to the north. Research suggests that
the Mechigamea were in fact a critical factor in the success of Fort Chartres. While their
population continued to decline precipitously over the eighteenth century, Mechigamea are
often identified in French correspondence – the “mechy” – and are specifically denoted as
allies of the British at Fort Chartres in the late 1760’s. The ways the Mechigamea used the
natural resources of the upper Mississippi Valley and their traces in the eighteenth-century
local topography establish them as far more present in the history of this area than traditional
documents reveal.
One of the most valuable and incisive overviews of the trade networks among the Indians
and French in the Illinois Country appears in the journal of Diron D’Artaguiette in 1722-23.
D’Artaguiette noted the three Illinois Indian villages located next to French settlements. The
3
One of the best descriptions of the proximal relations of the Indians and French in the Illinois Country is found
in Natalia Belting’s article, “The Native American as Myth and Fact,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical
Society, Vol. LXIX(2), May, 1976, pp. 119 –126. Belting states that “Indian alliances were ...essential to its
[New France’s] economy.” Indians were “the hunters and trappers, the harvesters, and the tanners of the pelts.”
See Belting, p. 122. This view can be contrasted with Raymond Hauser’s, who believes the French “did
deliberately destroy Illinois self-sufficiency...in order to secure the cooperation of the tribe in French colonial
ventures.” He cites La Salle as writing, “So long as it can be contrived to keep them dependent on us, they may
be readily held to their duty....” See Hauser, “The Illinois Indian Tribe: From Autonomy and Self-Sufficiency
to Dependency and Depopulation,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Vol. LXIX(2), May 1976, p.
135. La Salle did not establish the entire colonial policy for New France, and his initial perceptions should not
be taken as a template for the following century. The reciprocity of French-Indian trade, advantaging both
sides, is a more realistic assessment.
126
Illinois, he writes, “…are scattered about in three villages – the Cascakias, the
Mekchiquamias and the Cahokias”4 He gives population estimates for two of the three
villages – the Kaskaskia “about 200 warriors,” and the Mechigamea, also “about 200
warriors.”5 Of the Cahokia he gives no specific number; yet he judges the entire Illinois
nation to be “at present not more than 700 warriors.” 6 (As noted in Chapter Two, historians
interpret a single warrior as representing five persons). Between 1699 and D’Artaguiette’s
observations in 1722-23, a pattern of human interaction became established among resident
French, French soldiers, Jesuit priests, resident Indians in villages, traders and suppliers
journeying downriver from Canada and upriver from fledgling New Orleans, and constantly
appearing members of many other tribes – Missouri, Wea, Miami, Potawatomi, and the
Peoria from up on the Illinois River above Cahokia. D’Artaguiette perceived that the French
settlers had rapidly become middlemen in the provision trade between French troops
stationed at Fort Chartres and the Indians who both lived in the area and who passed through.
D’Artaguiette’s perceptions are so concise that they deserve to be fully stated here:
The trade of the inhabitants of the Illinois, who are Canadians, French, or discharged
soldiers, consists in selling their wheat and other products to the company [Company of
the Indies] for the subsistence of the troops, in exchange for merchandise (which they are
obliged to fetch from New Orleans) which they trade to the Indians for quarters of
buffalo, bear oil, and other meats, which serve them for food or which they sell in
exchange for merchandise. They also trade in skins, such as beaver, buck and deer,
buffalo and bear skins, and other peltries, which they get very cheap from the Indians,
and which they sell at a very high price to the traders who come down from Canada every
spring and autumn, and who give them merchandise in exchange. For it is not necessary
for them to rely upon having their needs supplied from New Orleans, whence very few
convoys come, and even when they do come they bring so few merchandizes that they
are not nearly sufficient to pay a part of the debts which the company is obliged to incur
every year.7
4
Journal of Diron D’Artaguiette, in Travels in the American Colonies, ed. Newton D. Mereness, p. 71.
Ibid., p. 68-70.
6
Ibid., p. 71.
7
Journal of Diron D’Artaguiette, in Newton Mereness, Travels, p. 70-71.
5
127
In this description, the interesting and undifferentiated phrase “which serve them for food
or which they sell in exchange for merchandise” raises an important question: to whom were
“the inhabitants of the Illinois” selling the “buffalo quarters, bear oil, and other meats”?
Since they were getting “merchandise” in return, the implication is that they sold salt meat
and bear oil downriver or to members of the French garrison with access to the official
magasin. D’Artaguiette clearly states that inhabitants sold maize to the soldiers; his journal
entry for June 9 is the single line, “Our boat set out from here to go to the Cascaskias to load
with maize for the subsistence of the troops.”8 The magasin (warehouse) at Fort Chartres
became central to the French settlements in terms of amount and variety of merchandise
stored and dispersed and its general social role. Originally the magasin serving the Company
of the Indies, the fort warehouse continued its role as supplier when the Company of the
Indies returned the French colonies to royal charter in 1731. A study of the role of the
magasin in the French communities of the floodplain concludes “...the magasin early on
became a collecting depot for export items [and]...the magasin soon became a buyer as well
as consignee-agent and forwarder.”9 The Fort Chartres magasin served the villages of
Chartres, St. Anne’s, St. Philippe, Prairie du Rocher, and, seven leagues south, Kaskaskia.10
D’Artaguiette’s perceptions about the trade relations among diverse groups in the Illinois
Country are all the more compelling given the incessant warfare between the Fox and the
Illinois Indians, despite a French-negotiated truce in 1716. The truce did not last, leading to
the historic defeat of the Fox by the French in 1730, for which some estimates place the
8
Journal of Diron D’Artaguiette, in Mereness, Travels, p. 82.
Winstanley Briggs, “The Forgotten Colony: Le Pays d’Illinois”, unpublished doctoral dissertation, University
of Chicago, 1985, p. 249.
10
See Briggs’ discussion of the magasin in “The Forgotten Colony,” pp. 249-251.
9
128
number of massacred Fox at 1,000 or 1200.11 Even after this defeat, the Fox continued to
attack the Illinois and the Illinois sporadically killed Fox hunters they encountered, especially
in the forested area along the Illinois River. Prior to both the Iroquois penetration into the
northern Illinois Country and the evolving relations with the French, the Illinois and Miami
Indians had participated in what Margaret Kimball Brown terms “mourning war.” Eric
Hinderaker best summarizes this style of attack: “The most familiar form of war in the
Illinois country was a mourning war, a localized, limited, and personal style of warfare that
was intended to exact revenge for an earlier death.” Both Brown and Hinderaker stress that
mourning war had a ritualized element.12 However, the localized nature of the mourning war
disintegrated when Fox hunters moving south and Illinois hunters moving north on seasonal
hunts both became dependent on the prairies of northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin.
Into these areas buffalo were accustomed to migrate in the summer to escape the torment of
green-headed flies and other deer flies. Competition for peltries and European trade, often
cited as driving the Fox-Illinois warfare, was complicated by a hunting war involving
buffalo. The size of these Illinois herds never approached that of the western Great Plains
herds.13 Nor did the Fox and the Illinois have horses during the time they were first observed
hunting on the prairies. In fact, R. David Edmunds’ depiction of the Fox lifeways, the
hunting-gathering-horticultural subsistence mosaic, is indistinguishable from descriptions of
the Illinois subsistence style: “Large numbers of waterfowl were taken on a seasonal basis,
and during the summer Fox hunting parties left their villages to travel to the prairies of
11
Wayne C. Temple, Indian Villages, p. 42. For defeat of the Fox on Grand Prairie, see Chapter Two, n. 122.
Eric Hinderaker, Elusive Empires: Constructing Colonialism in the Ohio Valley, 1673 – 1800 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 12-13. See also Margaret Kimball Brown, Cultural Transformations
Among the Illinois: An Application of a Systems Model (East Lansing, Michigan: Publications of the Museum,
Michigan State University, 1979), pp. 244-245.
13
See Chapter Six for a discussion of Illinois buffalo.
12
129
Illinois or Iowa where they killed buffalo.”14 The nature of the Fox-Illinois animosity
changed over the course of the eighteenth-century as the Illinois became domiciled Indians
and the Fox did not. Many factors enter into the periodic outbreaks of violence between
these two tribes. In 1719, for example, a party of hunting Illinois surprised a camp of mixed
Fox, Kickapoo, and Mascouten near Rock River, Illinois. They killed twenty people,
including some women and children, and took at least twenty prisoners back to Illinois.15
Such raids, already beyond the scope of the “mourning war,” escalated right up until the Fox
defeat in 1730, and continued beyond it. Each time a significant number of persons died, the
event became encapsulated in the oral history of the tribe and was recounted in an additive
and vehement litany. In 1724, Mechigamea and Kaskaskia Indian chiefs “recited to White
Cat [a traveling chief down from Michilimackinac] a list of [Fox] attacks and killings
perpetuated over the years at every one of the Illinois villages.”16
In 1752, the Cahokia were driven permanently from their mission settlement on the River
L’Abbe near Monks Mound, south to the Fort Chartres area, by an attack of Fox, Sauk,
Potawatomi, and Sioux.17 This war party had also wiped out the Mechigamea village near
the fort. Fox raided the Kaskaskia Indians steadily through the 1760’s and 1770’s. As late as
1778, George Rogers Clark was negotiating yet another treaty with the Fox at Cahokia to
bring about a cessation of Fox-Sauk-Illinois hostilities and raids. The Fox-Illinois conflict
can thus be documented as spanning the same time period as the French occupation of the
14
See R. David Edmunds and Joseph Peyser, The Fox Wars: The Mesquakie Challenge to New France
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1976), pp. 33-35.
15
Edmunds and Peyser, The Fox Wars, p. 93.
16
Cited from Wisconsin Historical Collections, 16, p. 456-61, in Jablow, Indians, p. 164.
17
John A. Walthall and Elizabeth D. Benchley, The River L’Abbe Mission: A French Colonial Church for the
Cahokia Illini on Monks Mound (Springfield, Illinois: Illinois Historic Preservation Agency, 1987), p. 11-12.
See also Raymond Hauser, “The Fox Raid of 1752: Defensive Warfare and the Decline of the Illinois Indian
Tribe,” Illinois Historical Journal, Vol. 86, 1993, pp. 210 –224.
130
Illinois Country.18 Yet this brief official history does not begin to document the spiking,
retaliatory, ambush-laden nature of the Fox-Illinois relations across the eighteenth century.
The river systems played an important role in haphazard and unplanned attacks, and in cases
where French traders happened to be accompanying Illinois Indians on upriver forays, they
were often killed. The threat of a Renard (Fox) attack on Fort Chartres in 1723 caused the
soldiers to “cut down the large bushes and other things which would favor an approach to
Fort Chartres.”19
Yet despite Fox raids on their fields and on Indian villages, the French continued to trade
with Indians on both sides of the Mississippi. Middlemen French farmers were receptive to
the Indian provisioning trade. At the settlement around Fort Chartres, they encouraged – and
were drawn into themselves – hunting and trapping trips across the Mississippi River into the
Missouri and Osage country, a practice bitterly resented by the Fox. Using the rivers that
made western Illinois so accessible and also, such a natural point of departure for lands north,
west, and south, Illinois Indians allied with French voyageurs drew upon an abundant natural
wilderness storehouse. French officials in New Orleans had clearly perceived the
possibilities of the Missouri lands as early as 1719. In that year, the Council of Commerce
meeting on Dauphine Island awarded gifts to two groups of Indian chiefs in the hopes of
establishing amicable trade relations with them. Two chiefs were “Kaskaskias who have
come down here to sing the calumet,” but the other were “four chiefs of the Missouri.” The
Kaskaskia Indians received a greater abundance of gifts, including eight dozen large knives
and “two hundred and ten pounds of powder.” The Missouri chiefs received six dozen large
18
Wayne C. Temple, Indian Villages, p. 95-96.
Journal of Diron D’Artaguiette, in Mereness, Travels, p. 78; for Fox depredations and ambushes of Indians
and French, see Joseph Jablow, Indians of Illinois and Indiana: Illinois, Kickapoo, and Potawatomi Indians
(New York: Garland Publishing Inc., 1974), p. 164-166.
19
131
knives and “two hundred pounds of powder.”20 Hunting and trapping merchandise weighed
large in these early gift inventories. The council directed the gifts to be dispersed among the
“warriors of their villages.”21
Studies of extant Indian gift lists in the decade before the Seven Years War – for both the
French and British – indicate blurred distinctions in the meaning of merchandise. Gifts were
to impart a “civilizing influence,” yet at the same time, gifts of munitions, war paint, scalping
knives, and even cutlasses appear to have promoted tribal warfare as well as Indian-white
hostilities.22 Given the amount of fervent writing in early French memorials about the rich
possibilities of the Illinois and Missouri lands, it is more likely that these 1719 gifts were
meant to encourage large-scale hunting and trapping. In fact, the scale of fur harvesting from
the upper Mississippi Valley continued to be staggering clear through the 1740’s. A peltry
inventory of a single trader/trapper from 1745, for example, contained “1156 cats large and
small” and “1160 bear large and small,” as well as otter, 134 foxskins, wolf, beaver and five
packets of deerskins.23 These were the halcyon days of French-Indian interaction: an
inaugural period in which gifts encouraged the development of a trade matrix at a new fort.
Almost thirty years later, in 1747, Governor Vaudreuil of New Orleans would write
threatening letters about withholding gifts to the Illinois, “if they continue to remain inactive
and give us the sole proofs of their friendship, promises to behave better to us in the
future.”24 In the same letter, Vaudreuil says of the Quapaw in Arkansas that he had “trouble
20
Minutes of the Council of Commerce Assembled at Dauphine Island on the Thirteenth of September, 1719, in
Mississippi Provincial Archives, 3, pp. 260-261.
21
Ibid.
22
See Wilbur R. Jacobs, Diplomacy and Indian Gifts: Anglo-French Rivalry Along the Ohio and Northwest
Frontiers, 1748-1763 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1950), pp. 55-57.
23
See inventory of Louis Bienvenu dit Delisle in Margaret Kimball Brown, The Voyageur in the Illinois
Country: The Fur Trade Professional Boatman in Mid America, Center for French Colonial Studies Extended
Publication Series Number 3 (Naperville, Illinois: Center for French Colonial Studies, 2002), p. 21.
24
Vaudreuil to Maurepas, March 15, 1747, in Pease, Illinois on the Eve, p. 9-10.
132
stirring them out of their lethargy.”25 The theme of Indian service to the French via a highly
industrious fur-collecting commitment remains clear in the letters of French officials all the
way through to the collapse of the regime.
It didn’t take long for Indians across the Mississippi to note the possibilities of a midcontinent trade warehouse. In late May of 1723, D’Artaguiette reported the arrival at Fort
Chartres of four Missouri Indians. The fort these Indians were visiting was not the imposing,
wide-winged limestone structure with an impressive enceinte and ornate gate (constructed in
the early 1750’s as the third Fort Chartres). Surrounded by crude palings already decaying in
the soggy earth, the 1723 Fort Chartres was a log rectangle, smoke-stained and palisaded,
with two bastions at diagonal corners.26 Two other bastions may have been added to a
second fort. On the scaffolding of each bastion was a bell, and the bastions themselves
eventually held a prison, a henhouse, and a stable.27 The strikingly level lands around the
fort would have enabled arriving visitors to take in the extent of French settlement: scattered
houses made of “pickets,” partially-cleared land in black gashes of seeded earth, and
unfenced, foraging domestic animals. Archaeological investigations at this first Fort
Chartres site confirm high numbers of domesticated and large-mammal bones, a trend
supported by documents describing the early florescence of agriculture and cattle-and-pig
husbandry; bison bones are also well-represented.28 Despite the presence of numerous
wooden structures, pigs and chickens, garden plots and grain outfields, the Fort Chartres
25
Ibid.
Jelks, Ekberg, and Martin, Excavations at the Laurens Site, p. 112
27
David Keene, “Fort de Chartres: Archaeology in the Illinois Country,” in French Colonial Archaeology: The
Illinois Country and the Western Great Lakes, ed. by John Walthall (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991)
p. 31.
28
See table of Selected Vertebrate Remains in Jelks, Ekberg, and Martin, Excavations, p. 106. The excavations
of faunal remains at the Laurens site contrast with those discovered at the more remote Ouiatenon post on the
Wabash. The French diet at Ouiatenon reflected a higher incidence of wild game.
26
133
prairies in 1723 would have still been very wet. The French had encountered spring flooding
of streams and the Coulee Deneau. In addition, the great marsh overflowed as rains and river
saturated the floodplain. Notarial records from years later indicate the building of ditches into
natural runs to direct the “discharge” from the marsh toward the river.29 Myriad ponds of all
sizes dotted the land, forming overnight in small depressions and dry runs as the water table
rose unchecked. On brimming surfaces were already breeding the malarial-laden
mosquitoes. Retreating spring floodwaters – an annual inundation that all who lived along the
river would get used to – laid down a shining, tacky surface and filled the air with alluvial
stench. Fort Chartres, the future pride of the French Empire in North America, sat on a plain
of black mud.
Nonetheless, the fort and its surroundings impressed Indian tribes living, especially, to the
west and north. In 1723, the Missouri Indians who came to pay their respects would have
encountered a significantly altered landscape, where only four years before browsing deer
brushed through tallgrass prairies and the wide marsh near the cliffs was raucous with nesting
waterfowl. Word was out among the Missouri tribes about change, about settlement and a
permanent trade center. The Missouri Indians had evidently come to open up trade relations
with the French, for on June 6, they re-crossed the Mississippi “accompanied by Frenchmen
who were going among them...to trade in horses and to buy skins.”30 By 1725, the lure of the
Missouri lands was consistently drawing French and Indians across the river. Reports to
France in 1725 by French observers Longuiel and Begon mentioned Kickapoo and Fox
attacks on the French themselves: “...the latter tribe [Fox] say they will not allow the French
29
For instance, see Record K-206, (H223) for a 1755 description of a property on Royal Street in the village of
Chartres, bounded “...on the other [side] by the run used as a discharge of the marsh.” In Margaret Kimball
Brown and Lawrie Cena Dean, The Village of Chartres in Colonial Illinois 1720 – 1765 (New Orleans:
Polyanthos, 1977), p. 594.
30
Journal of Diron D’Artaguiette, cited in Joseph Jablow, Indians of Illinois and Indiana, p.161.
134
to pass to go to the Scioux, because the trade the French would do with them would greatly
reduce that which they do there themselves.”
Longueil adds that “the Renards and Scioux,
acting in concert, have attacked the French who are settled among the Illinois, and that both
tribes are so enraged with the Illinois that it is impossible to make them stop.”31
The spread of French hunting and fur-gathering efforts across the Mississippi into the
plentiful game country of the Missouri is clearly indicated in commercial records. In 1724
the Osage Indians had sent a message to French authorities in Louisiana that they had
amassed a quantity of peltry, including much beaver, that they wished to trade for French
merchandise.32 The Illinois colonies lay directly across from the Osage lands; and the
garrison of Fort Chartres was stocked with both merchandise and gifts for Indians willing to
trade with and stay loyal to the French (such loyalty often meant serving in French armies
attacking other tribes and British outposts). In 1735, for example, despite renewed hostilities
between the Fox and the Illinois, French traders were able to purchase from the Sioux
“100,000 beautiful beaver skins.”33 Approximately nine years later, at the outbreak of King
George’s War, such was the lure of the deerskin and peltry trade that one estimate put 1,600
Frenchmen “engaged in it.” Commercial figures from the Archives Nationales, Colonies,
Paris, transcribed in the Public Records Office of Jackson, Mississippi, indicate a “large
31
Pierre Margry, Decouvertes et Etablishments des Francais dans l’Ouest et dans la Sud de L’Amerique
Septentrionale (1616-1754), English Translation, Vol. 6, p. 548, cited in Joseph Jablow, Indians of Illinois and
Indiana : Illinois, Kickapoo, and Potawatomi Indians (New York: Garland Publishing Inc., 1974), p. 166.
32
Nancy M. Miller Surrey, The Commerce of Louisiana During the French Regime: 1699- 1763 (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1916), p. 347, citing Pierre Margry, Decouvertes et Etablishments des Francois
dans l’Ouest et dans le Sud de l”Amerique Septentriole (Paris, 1879-1888), vol. vi, p. 427.
33
Nancy N. Miller Surrey, The Commerce of Louisiana, p. 354.
135
number” of furs going down the Mississippi to New Orleans each year; in 1745, the value
was given as 9,621 livres.34
While agricultural studies such as those of Carl Ekberg have stressed the production of
cereal grains and the shipping of surplus wheat and flour south to New Orleans, neither
Ekberg’s studies nor analyses based on French government economic figures and regulations
take into account the clandestine activities of individuals in a fluid frontier trade environment
For such a system to have developed early – in the first decade of French occupation – there
must have been many opportunities for exchange among French and Indians. In the first
years of the Chartres settlement, in 1727, for instance, a series of notarial records details an
inquiry into a trading mission carried out by the Sieur Poudret into the Pawnee and Osage
territory across the Mississippi. In an inquiry that spanned two months, a man – likely a
voyageur -- Poudret hired to accompany him, Jean Jacques Desmanets, gave a deposition
about Poudret’s activities. There was evidently some question about whether Poudret’s words
to the Osage had incited them to make war on the Pawnee. As revealed in the long, tangled
narrative involving the stealing of Indian slaves and Spanish trade horses, Poudret’s dealings
with these Trans-Mississippi Indians took him into three different camps: the Missouri, the
Osage, and the Pawnee.35 The efforts of the French to keep peace among the warring tribes
in order to facilitate their own trading success were often ineffectual. Desmanets’ testimony,
for example, indicates how Poudret’s diplomacy was received: “We told them [the Pawnee]
34
See discussion in Surrey, The Commerce, p. 360. The ANC records do not clearly differentiate the source of
the peltries – from the upper Missouri Country across from French Illinois, from the Arkansas tribes, or from
the lower Mississippi Valley. Earlier records do make this distinction, as noted by Miller Surrey in drawing
from the Archives, Bibliotheque du Department des Affaires Etrangeres, Paris. See the list of furs obtained from
lower Mississippi tribes, p. 348. The Abikas tribe alone furnished 8,000 skins.
35
See notarial record K-411 in Brown and Dean, The Village of Chartres, 891-895.
136
to live in peace with the Osage and other nations, that this was the word of the French chief.
But they replied that they had eaten the Osage and that they would always eat them.”36
Through the formal establishment of Fort Chartres, France sought to control FrenchIndian trade in the Illinois Country. The Provincial Council in Illinois, the governing body
authorized by the Company of the Indies, had instructed French traders and military going
into the Missouri country not to interfere in the traffic in Paducah (Apache) slaves or horses.
The Missouri tribes involved in these trades might become “alienated” and begin to sell
peltries to Fox Indians or rogue British traders.37 Official accounts of expeditions, or notarial
depositions such as that of the Poudret trip, detail only isolated cases. Other kinds of records
provide interesting measures of the degree of casual, opportunistic trade contact between
French and Indians developing out of the Chartres trade matrix. Ten years later in 1736, for
instance, a Frenchman living at Fort Michilimackinac compiled a “census of Indian tribes.”
While French censuses were usually taken by arriving military commanders or by officiallyappointed engineers and cartographers, this time the numbers of tribal warriors, ranging from
Kickapoo and Mascouten to the Illinois Confederacy, were based on the on-site estimates of
French voyageurs and fur trappers.38 There were enough Frenchmen present in Indian
villages to take head counts. One historian studying the contracts drawn up among FrenchCanadian voyageurs and employers, as well as the numbers of billets (due bills) for trade
goods has concluded, “By 1736 French traders were regularly ascending the Missouri...
36
Declaration of Jean Jacques Desmanets, in notarial record K-411, Brown and Dean, The Village of Chartres,
p. 893.
37
See the detailed account of the expedition of Veniard de Bourgmont in 1723-24 into the Missouri Country for
the purposes of establishing the short-lived Fort d‘Orleans, in Marcel Giraud, A History of French Louisiana, V,
transl. by Brian Pearce (Louisiana State University Press, 1987), pp. 445-455.
38
Census is in the New York Colonial Documents 9: 1055-1057, cited in Jablow, Indians of Illinois and
Indiana, p. 188.
137
between February and November, 1737, four pairs of French traders planned to ascend the
Missouri to trade.”39
The river systems in which major waterways drained into the Mississippi from the east
and west left the trappers and traders of French Illinois uniquely poised: once on the rivers
and streams, they became fundamentally unaccountable. In light bark canoes or heavier
pirogue designed to ferry specific weights and amounts of furs and goods, trappers, hunters,
and seasonal traders could fan out over hundreds of miles of feeder streams, smaller rivers,
many unnamed and appearing on no maps until the late eighteenth century.40 Both the
Company of the Indies and the French government sought to regulate trade activity through
the licensing of traders, the leasing out of fur posts, and gifts dispensed from Fort Chartres
and other forts to secure and monitor tribal loyalties.41
Yet the slippery, highly-
opportunistic trading world of riverine traffic remained impossible to monitor. Surviving
narratives of escapes from Indian attacks on the river – contained mainly in the detailed
letters of Commander Macarty at Fort Chartres – often describe how French traders, slaves,
and Illinois Indians hid in bulrushes, laid low on islands, crawled through canebrakes,
secreted their canoes in tangled willow copses. The river offered concealment and escape
but it also played a strangely undefined role as a boundary. Part of the amorphous nature of
39
Theresa J. Piazza, “The Kaskaskia Manuscripts: French Traders in the Missouri Valley Before Lewis and
Clark,” The Missouri Archaeologist Vol. 53, December, 1992, pp. 20-21.
40
For example, see note 1 in a document entitled, “Proposed Colony in the Illinois,” in Theodore C. Pease,
Illinois on The Eve of the Seven Years War, Collections of the Illinois State Historical Library, Vol. 29
(Springfield: Illinois State Historical Library, 1940), p. 135. This 1749 plan detailed a French colony on the
Wabash (the Ohio), an idea resurfacing across the 1750’s and 1760’s as a strategic benefit but never acted upon.
The plan contains river designations such as “the Green, Bon Secours, and Michecaco Rivers.” As explained by
Pease, on a 1755 map, the ‘Michecaco’ was noted as a tributary of the Illinois River; Pease identified it as
possibly “Crooked Creek, Spoon River, Copperas Creek, or Kickapoo Creek.”
41
The best discussion of French efforts to regulate the Canadian fur trade is still Louise Phelps Kellogg, French
Regime in Wisconsin and the Northwest (Madison: The State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1925), especially
her chapter, “Changes in Fur Trade Methods.” As Kellogg points out, “The licensed traders also were but a few
of those who trafficked in the wilderness” (p. 366). Margaret Kimball Brown also discusses the leasing of
Missouri posts and the use of the conge (trading permit) in The Voyageur in the Illinois Country.
138
the trade west and north of Fort Chartres had to do with the unspecified nature of the Illinois
Country. The official boundaries between French Canada and French Louisiana were never
crisply set out anywhere. After it was made part of the province of Louisiana in 1731, the
Illinois Country was thought to extend to “the headwaters of the Mississippi.” 42 Although
this was disputed by both French Canada and Louisiana, French Canadians, French
Illinoisans, and myriad Indians continued to hunt, trap, and trade on the tributaries and inlets
of the Mississippi River System, indicating a generally-held belief that trade law and trade
boundaries were unenforceable.
River trade was facilitated by the presence of master boatbuilders at the French villages
of Kaskaskia and Chartres. The deep, sturdy pirogues hewn of whole cottonwood trees or
sometimes, black walnut, were used for the New Orleans convoy. Private individuals as well
as the French government contracted for such craft, and commercial agreements provide
official specifications and descriptions.43 Yet these few surviving records barely sketch in
the outlines of river transport. A 1726 estate inventory in the Chartres notarial records
includes “Half of one Indian pirogue of walnut,” suggesting the Indians were also builders of
river craft, and that some French traded for or otherwise obtained these boats.44 Analysis of
contracts for voyageurs has shown that some Illinois Indians signed on as voyageurs for the
French, including one Penchirois, “said to be from the Xavier mission located on the
Mechigamea reserve.”45 Voyageurs are identified in some contracts as “upriver,” yet the
historian who has analyzed these contracts in depth, Margaret Kimball Brown, indicates how
42
Louise Kellogg provides a concise overview of the claims of various French governors in both Louisiana and
Canada, especially, the Memorial of Vaudreuil in 1748, in Kellogg, French Regime, pp. 371-373.
43
See the thorough discussion of river voiture (craft) in Carl J. Ekberg, French Roots, Appendix, pp.273-279;
for analysis of contracts for the building of river craft, see Margaret Kimball Brown, The Voyageur, pp. 8-11.
44
See Record K-416 in Brown and Dean, The Village of Chartres, p. 901.
45
Contained in the Kaskaskia Mss., 1743, cited in Margaret Kimball Brown, The Voyageur, p. 8.
139
entwined the official network of traders/voyageurs was: their names form an “interconnected
network” which turn up “repeatedly in different associations.”46 Brown points out that it is
impossible to know just how many persons ever participated in the river trade; the only
specific indication lies in the 1732 census that lists “transients who come and go, about fifty
men.”47 And of course, French inventories of furs held by successfully-returning traders do
not detail how those furs were obtained. Behind entries like “448 livres of beaver in five
packets,” or “120 livres of dry beaver at 30 sols the livre,” there may have been a
complicated trading history involving Indians from as many as ten upriver tribes.48 These
packets of furs and hundreds of cat and bearskins represent a drainage harvest of a
formidable amount of land; and they may have been obtained in a myriad of casual trade
transactions ranging from the exchange of a single raccoon skin that would net a “small knife
for a woman” to a man’s ruffled shirt priced at “2 Bucks or 2 middleing D[eer] or 2 otters or
7 raccoons.”49
The number of light, easily-carried canoes on the feeder streams and rivers of the Upper
Mississippi Valley – the unofficial record – was likely legion. While most interpretations of
the Ojibway word for the Mississippi settle on “father of waters” or “great river,” at least one
river historian believes the real meaning to be closer to “river of waters from all sides.”50
The French as well as the Indians had grasped this. In 1749, after the end of King George’s
War, a curious document appeared called “Instructions for the Exploration of Louisiana.”
An objective, even scientific assessment of the entire Mississippi River Valley was to be
46
Margaret Kimball Brown, The Voyageur, p. 24.
Brown, p. 28.
48
See lists of furs obtained in 1747 and 1745, respectively, in Brown, p. 21.
49
These exchange rates are for the year 1765, listed on a “Schedule of equivalents for barter of goods and
skins,” cited in Margaret Kimball Brown, Cultural Transformations Among the Illinois: An Application of a
Systems Model (East Lansing, Michigan: Michigan State University, 1979), p. 250.
50
E.W. Gould, Fifty Years on the Mississippi, or Gould’s History of River Navigation (Saint Louis: NixonJones Printing Co., 1889), p. 28.
47
140
undertaken by “M. Riday, known as Bosseron.’ Bosseron’s instructions are extremely
precise. In the area of the Illinois,
It must be exactly stated how many leagues the rivers will carry canoes without a
portage, and above the portages how many leagues farther can one carry them. What is
thought to be the place at which they rise; do they come from various lakes, marshes, or
prairies, and if in their origin they are considerable; what the relation is between the
Bountiful river, otherwise called the Ohio, and the other rivers that empty into it or
which border it, as well as the Illinois or the Mississippi.51
All aspects of Bosseron’s instructions stress the riverine geography of the French Empire
south of the Great Lakes, revealing some realistic understanding of the French and Indian
trade networks. Bosseron was also to undertake an anthropological assessment of Indian
tribes living in the lands drained by the rivers. The trade behaviors of these Indians were of
particular importance, along with their propensities for alcohol, their populations, and
curiously, the exact numbers of men and women in tribal estimates. The fruits of this
expedition, if it ever took place, are not recorded. Included among a host of documents from
the period before the Seven Years War, this set of instructions says a great deal about the role
of water and river transport in the French Empire along the Mississippi.
An additional factor in the growth of such riverine exchange contacts was the long
cultural trading history of the Mechigamea Indians, living in a village only a mile north of
Fort Chartres. It is important to factor in the skilled trade history of these Indians, because as
one archaeologist/historian of the French fur trade in the central subarctic (Hudson Bay
region) has noted, “...Indians [were] shrewd consumers who knew how to take full advantage
of the economic opportunities offered to them.” Studies of Indians as consumers in the
eighteenth century have shown discriminating trade behaviors of a complexity far beyond
the earliest European-Indian contact patterns, in which, for instance, all Jesuit priests
51
“Instructions for Exploration of Louisiana,” in Pease, Illinois on the Eve, p. 5.
141
ventured into the Canadian wilderness with supplies of “small trinkets.”52 While historians
have been able to reconstruct trading patterns of northern Indians, good evidence for trade
behaviors of the Illinois Indians is not manifest across the French regime. And because of the
distressingly real, deleterious effects of French brandy on Illinois tribes, historians have
sometimes concentrated on the problems of the illicit liquor exchange and glossed the role of
the provisioning trade. An emphasis on agriculture as the best measure of industriousness has
also contributed to perceptions of Indians living near the fort as dependent and
opportunistic.53 It is clear from a 1726 memorial written by the Sieur de Bienville that
Indians in the Illinois Country were molding the kind of trade that developed there. Bienville
noted that
the voyageurs of Canada formerly obtained from them [the Illinois] a large number of
beaver [and] raccoon skins and skins of deer, bears and of buffaloes, but for six or
seven years the French have been obliging them to devote themselves to producing
[bear] oil, tallow and meat for which they trade with them.54
Bienville perceived that it was the French who were “obliging” the Illinois Indians to furnish
a specific kind of trade; this is an oblique way of saying that Illinois Indians learned to
furnish the provisional items that would net them the kind of trade goods they wanted.
The history of the French wheat convoys leaving Kaskaskia each spring – the multitude of
embarking pirogues, heavy with concentrated grain, furs, skins, salted meat and oils –
inscribes a cultural as well as economic upriver ritual. This emphasis obscures the reality of
52
See Arthur J. Ray’s important study, “Indians as Consumers in the Eighteenth Century,” in Old Trails and
New Directions: Papers of the Third North American Fur Trade Conference (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1980), p. 267. Northern Canadian Indians rejected any substandard kettle or cooking pot, and would
assess the iron or copper quality of kettles minutely; an equal scrutiny was given to knives. There is no reason
to think that Illinois Indians could not shape the nature of their trade with the French in similar ways.
53
For instance, Carl Ekberg in his introduction to Francois Valle and his world describes the 1719 Kaskaskia
Indians as already “alcohol-ravaged.” See Carl J. Ekberg, Francois Valle and his world: Upper Louisiana
Before Louis and Clark (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002), p. 9.
54
Memorial of Bienville, in Mississippi Provincial Archives 3, p. 533-534.
142
hundreds of such riverine trading voyages each year by Indians, French voyageurs, and even
some enterprising women. By 1741, the governor of Louisiana was noting the arrival in New
Orleans of “a rather large quantity of peltries....” Some of the furs had come from the
Missouri Indians and other Indians “west of the Mississippi.”55 Although many different
tribes relied on the Mississippi, from the Sioux near the Falls of St. Anthony all the way
down to the Alibamon and the Taensas near the Gulf, the French at mid-continent had
particularly observed the Illinois Indians. In 1729, one M. Perier declared in a letter that the
“Illini were masters of the Mississippi River and must be kept from joining the English.”56
And this broad, sinuous, chimerical river was especially important to the Mechigamea
Indians.
The Mechigamea emerge in the history of French Illinois as one of the most interesting
and little-studied tribes; there is a dearth of documentary history concerning them, but
archaeological evidence and their historical associations with the Quapaw in Arkansas
suggest a strongly riverine people. In reviewing the French-Indian interaction across
approximately seventy years, on a strip of riparian land sixty miles long, one fact stands out:
among the four Illinois Confederacy tribes, the Mechigamea avoided open conflict with the
French. They lived the closest to them, a mile above the village of Chartres; yet, unlike the
events at the Cahokia grant, in which the Cahokia-Tamaroa were removed to a village nine
miles away after a bloodless “revolt,” the Mechigamea stayed in their village in fairly
intimate contact with French inhabitants and the fort. By 1721, in fact, it seems there were
actually two Mechigamea villages above Fort Chartres, strung out along the river bank.57
55
Letter in Wisconsin Historical Collections 17, p. 336, cited by Jablow, Indians of Illinois and Indiana, p. 191.
Perier letter of August 15, 1729, in Chicago Historical Society, cited in Wayne C. Temple, Indian Villages of
the Illinois Country, p. 41.
57
Dan Hechenberger, “The Metchigamea Tribe,” in M’Skutewe Awandiangwi, Nipundikan, 1997, Vol. 1:2, p. 1.
56
143
Archaeological studies (site digs) have not been conducted at these former villages, due to
their being entirely on private land. Researchers, however, have analyzed surface finds and
especially, ceramic shard collections turned up through cultivation. Pottery and glazed
earthenware, incised geometries and concentric swirls distinctive to lower river tribes like the
Tunica and Natchez reveal an extensive trading history. Mechigamea ceramic vessel use –
and the poignant, scattered overlay of French faience plates, platter shards, and pitchers –
bespeak a process of acculturation and change. At certain key points of transition in kinds of
pottery sought, traded for, and used, it is possible to infer shifts in trade and subsistence
behaviors. These trade patterns in turn were linked to the French settlements on the lower
river, to French mercantilism and trade policies, and to seemingly peripheral developments
such as animal husbandry on an island peninsula between Kaskaskia and Fort Chartres.58
While ceramics were “traded widely among Indian groups occupying the Mississippi Valley
region from 1680 to 1750,” after that date, aboriginal ceramic vessels were no longer in
use.59 The Mechigamea had shifted early on, possibly by 1719, into the provision trade.
Before contact with the French became fairly steady, after 1680, the Mechigamea had
been middleman traders for the Quapaw Indian tribes of northeast Arkansas and possibly, as
many as nine other tribes living along the Arkansas River before 1700. They likely had a
summer village near the present-day Arkansas town of Pocahontas along the Black River.
The Grigsby site, investigated in 1988 by the Arkansas Archaeological Survey, is believed to
58
This livestock “peninsula” was noted by Nicolas de Finiels in the 1790’s. Here the French bred and
contained their sturdy ponies, an intermixed breed of some Arabian and French stock, possibly some mustang.
One early history of the Prairie du Rocher area calls these horses “point ponies,” perhaps referring to the
peninsular point where they were grazed. The peninsula made stealing these horses very difficult; their
naturally-increasing numbers lessened the need for Indian horses procured from the Trans-Mississippi tribes,
thereby affecting a trade network that had existed since before 1700. For “point ponies,” see E.J. Montague,
“The History of Randolph County, Illinois, Including Old Kaskaskia Island,” p. 10.
59
John A. Walthall, “Aboriginal Pottery and the Eighteenth-Century Illini,” in Calumet & Fleur-de-Lys:
Archaeology of Indian and French Contact in the Midcontinent (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press,
1992), p. 169.
144
be the Mechigamea village written in on two separate maps by Joliet and Marquette.60 At
this central location, accessible through the river systems, the Mechigamea came to secure
ceramics in the distinctive Quapaw tradition, characterized by the so-called Quapaw Swirl, as
well as horses obtained from the Spanish and driven overland towards the Mississippi.
Arabian horses were herded along a (possibly) paleo-historic trail winding northeast between
San Antonio and St. Louis. In return for horses and pottery, the Mechigamea were the
purveyors of prized French trade goods, readily-available in the proto-historic period and
certainly in rich metallic flow across the Great Lakes region between 1610-70.61 The trading
loop regularly brought the Mechigamea downstream in a host of transport craft extensive
enough to move entire villages.
This role changed dramatically when the French settled the Illinois Country. While some
artistic re-creations of Mechigamea villages show women engaged in agriculture, such as
pounding corn or flailing grain, it is more likely that a prime activity in the Chartres riverine
villages of this Illinois tribe was the making of bear oil. Omnivorous black bears ranged thick
along the Mississippi River and its woodlands, eating constantly as they moved across miles
of terrain, following white deer herds, fish runs in inland streams, insect and grub
populations, and seasonal berries and nuts. The shooting of shoreline black bears, including
mothers and cubs, by Europeans in river craft is documented many times, especially before
1720. Europeans rapidly developed a taste for bear oil; it was “claimed by some to be quite
60
Sarah Jones Tucker, Indian Villages of the Illinois, Plates IV and V; for discussion of Grigsby site artifacts
and the profile of the Mechigamea in the 1670’s,see Dan F. Morse, “The Seventeenth-Century Michigamea
Village Location in Arkansas,” in Calumet & Fleur- de-Lys, pp. 55-74.
61
Dan F. Morse, “The Seventeenth-Century Michigamea,” in Calumet & Fleur-de-Lys, p. 62; John A. Walthall
et al, “Woman Chief’s Village: An Illini Winter Hunting Camp,” in Calumet & Fleur-de-Lys, emphasize the
importance of knives: “Knives were among the earliest and most demanded trade goods brought into the Illinois
Country.” Walthall inventories trade goods from 1688 as containing twenty-three dozen case knives of standard
size, three dozen case knives of large size, and six dozen clasp knives (citing Pease and Werner, 1934).
145
as good for salads as the best grade of the latter [olive oil].”62 Fats and oils were not arriving
at French settlements with any regularity at all; especially in the early years, the supply ships
from the Company of the Indies were erratic, sparse, and sometimes lost at sea. Animal fat
from game became an important source of calories and was also necessary in the care of guns
and the few metal implements available in the Illinois Country. Indians living south of the
Illinois were observed at mid century making a “deer of oil,” using an entire, peeled-off
deerskin with orifices plugged with a lime and salt paste to hold rendered bear oil.63
Choctaw Indians used deer heads with plugged orifices as containers. The deer of oil, filled
heads, and filled bladders were treated as units of exchange in the trade. In Alabama,
southern Indians even managed natural “bear ranges” devoted to the increase of black bear
populations; one such range lay near the Chattahootchee River.64 Indians themselves
prohibited villages and hunting in these areas. In the French bear oil trade, Indian hunters
obtained much of the meat and oil along the St. Francis River in northern Arkansas; Arkansas
Indians could furnish as much as 3,000 pots of oil annually.65 It was with the Arkansas
Indians that the Mechigamea had sustained trade and living contacts. The St. Francis River
and the Black River, summer camp to the Mechigamia, are both in the same northeastern
quadrant of Arkansas.
62
Nancy N. M. Surrey, The Commerce of Louisiana, p. 262.
Le Page du Pratz, The History of Louisiana, or of the Western Parts of Virginia and Carolina: Containing a
Description of the Countries that lye on both Sides of the River Mississippi: With An Account of the Settlements,
Inhabitants, Soil, Climate, and Products, Vol. II (London: T. Becket and P.A. De Hondt, 1763), p. 62.
64
Herbert B. Battle, “The Domestic Use of Oil Among the Southern Aborigines,” American Anthropologist,
Vol. 24, No. 2 (April-May 1922), p. 173. See also the discussion of bear oil use and its connection with deer
population in Ian W. Brown, “Certain Aspects of French-Indian Interaction in Lower Louisiane,” in Calumet &
Fleur-de-Lys, p. 21, and Daniel J. Usner, Indians, Settlers, and Slaves, p. 206.
65
Surrey, p. 262. See also Margaret Kimball Brown, The Voyageur in the Illinois Country, p. 5, n. 5, and p. 21,
for an overview of the meaning of the term “pot” in conjunction with the shipping of both bear oil and brandy.
A Canadian half gallon “was a pot or quarte, equal to 63.4 ounces.” Brown indicates that a barrel would hold
twenty pots (about ten gallons).
63
146
It is likely the Mechigamea were drawn into the bear oil trade through their Quapaw
connections, although it may also have been the other way around. In 1740, a free black in
the Illinois, Jacques Duverger, also a surgeon and trader, “acquired 150 pots of bear oil.”
Surviving records include a contract with another voyageur to transport the pots of oil south
to New Orleans.66 How did Duverger “acquire” the substantial number of 150 pots of bear
oil? While in rare instances, a very fat black bear might be rendered to produce as much as
120 pots of oil, this was likely not a common outcome.67 The misleading aspect of surviving
trade and commercial records is the way they commodify large amounts of organic trade
material to suggest a single source. Bear oil, like salted meat, smoked buffalo tongue, hides,
furs, and smaller peltries, was a trade item of incremental as well as gross value. A French
trapper/trader or an Indian could exchange one pot or 100 pots, and such transactions could
occur literally anywhere – on river banks, at midstream from canoe to pirogue, between
mounted hunting parties on the bluffs of the Missouri River, at the mouth of the Illinois River
in the shade of the towering rock formations there, on an island south of Kaskaskia – or at
Fort Chartres. Contracts with voyageurs to accompany traders on hunting expeditions were
usually made in late summer, for the party to leave in the fall. In particular, autumn bear
were fat from their summer feeding and produced the greatest amount of oil.68 Yet the sheer
amount of oil being convoyed downriver to New Orleans suggests strongly that many Indians
were regular producers, and that they traded oil in both small and large amounts.
The oil production process highlights the connection between bear and deer. To kill a
black bear and butcher it using heavy knives; to boil the meat down in large kettles,
rendering the fat slowly through hours of tended wood fires kept at a steady heat; to procure
66
Kaskaskia Mss., 1740, cited in Margaret Kimball Brown, The Voyageur, p. 7.
Statistic of 120 pots from one bear cited in Brown, p. 8.
68
Margaret Kimball Brown, The Voyageur, p. 12.
67
147
a freshly-killed deer and skillfully butcher it to keep the skin entire and uncut, or skin and
boil a deer skull, then fill and caulk orifices – this process required the joint handling of both
bear and deer and an established work site. The size of both mammals, black bear and deer,
and the cauldrons necessary to render the oil as a commodity make it unlikely that Indians
could produce good quality bear oil in an opportunistic fashion. It also mandates the use of
large kettles. Indian demand for both iron and copper kettles remained consistently high in
the Illinois Country. The French government had taken on an increasingly active role in
provisioning, transporting, selling, and dispersing goods as part of a mercantile economic
system; that system depended on the fur trade, in which peltries flowed both north and south,
and on the sale of surplus wheat to the New Orleans colony, in which foodstuffs flowed
south. Surviving in the Macarty Correspondence collection at Huntington Library is a single
undated Government indent for supplies sent to the Illinois country by convoy up the
Mississippi. Best estimates at dating this manifest would place it in 1751 or 1752.69 Lists of
goods are identified for various parties: “For the Indians,” “For the French in Payment for
Jobs,” “For the Barracks,” “For the Hospital,” “For the Magasin,” and “For the Office.” This
inventory is revealing of trade trends, both sanctioned and perhaps, unsanctioned. At a time
when the number of French troops defending the Illinois Country was not over 300, the
goods designated “For the Barracks,” include “50 large cooking pots for the troops.” On
February 1, 1752, French Commander Macarty Mactigue wrote to Antoine-Louis Rouille,
Comte de Jouy and Minister of the Marine in Paris: “I have three hundred men of troops to
keep three or four hundred leagues of country.”70 However, at the time Macarty wrote, the
soldiers were not living in a fort but with the townspeople in French Kaskaskia. Plans were
69
70
Manifest is cited in Briggs, “The Forgotten Colony,” p. 373-374.
Macarty to Rouille, February 1, 1752, in Pease, Illinois on the Eve, p. 481.
148
underway for the building of a new fort on either the Kaskaskia River or farther inland from
the existent Fort Chartres; the second wooden fort, erected between 1725-1728, was so
decayed it could not lodge or support a garrison of troops. Macarty hoped that construction
could be completed on the barracks by 1753: “We have lodged the soldiers in the houses of
the townspeople, who are paying for the lodging....”71 The fifty iron cooking pots shipped up
from New Orleans may not have ended up in the new barracks at all. An inventory of the
material goods at Fort Chartres, conducted by both the French and the British in 1765,
reveals less than ten iron kettles scattered throughout the various structures of the fort.72
This trade manifest also profiles Indian trade good preference. In the list of goods
designated “For the Indians,” appears an entry for “400 pounds of copper cauldrons, all sizes,
like those in Canada.”73 This entry for cauldrons is one of the largest on the list of trade and
gift items for Indians. Anthropological and archaeological studies have consistently stressed
the high preference of Indians in many North American locations for iron and especially,
brass and copper cooking pots.74 Excavations at Osage village sites in Missouri, for
example, reveal that “nearly all the brass artifacts represent secondary use by the Indians, and
were made of scrap from brass kettles.”75 A comparison of goods traded to the Illinois
Indians at three different points in time – 1688, 1710, and 1765 – shows the escalation in
demand for pots. In 1710 Father Marest writing from the Cahokia Mission did not include
71
Macarty and Buchet to Vaudreuil, January 15, 1752, in Pease, p. 426.
“Inventory of the Goods at Fort De Chartres,” in Clarence W. Alvord and Clarence Carter, The New Regime
1765 –1767 (Springfield: Illinois State Historical Library, 1916), pp. 102 –104.
73
See Manifest in Briggs, The Forgotten Colony, pp. 374-377.
74
For instance, see Bruce Trigger’s discussion of seventeenth century Huron trade good preferences, p. 209210, and also, Indians’ re-use of broken iron implements and artifacts through metal and iron re-working, p.
216, in Bruce G. Trigger, Natives and Newcomers: Canada’s “Heroic Age” Reconsidered (Kingston and
Montreal, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1985); for discussion of the archaeology of trade goods in the
Middle Historic Period, 1670-1760, see George Irving Quimby, Indian Culture and European Trade Goods
(Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1966), pp. 71-72. Quimby posits that pieces of iron kettles may
have been detached and used as hoes. For Illinois Indians’ gradual conversion to brass kettles, see discussion by
John Walthall , “Aboriginal Pottery and the Eighteenth-Century Illini,” in Calumet & Fleur-de-Lys, p. 168.
75
Theresa J. Piazza, “The Kaskaskia Manuscripts,” p. 26.
72
149
any requests for pots on his list of requested items. By 1765, entries appear on trade lists for
“brass kettles as they weigh at the rate of 1 lb. Beaver a pound” and “tin or camp kettles of a
Gallon 1 Bever or 1 Buck and Doe.”76 In that year, 1765, Captain Thomas Stirling described
an incident on the Ohio River on his way to the Illinois country. One of his party tried to buy
a kettle from a Mingo woman; she insisted on 25 buckskins and eventually got the equivalent
in rum, for which she immediately traded and received 20 buckskins. Stirling thought the
kettle “old” but noted that the woman effectively sold it for “about four guineas & a half.”77
The shift into the provision trade is also highlighted archaeologically. Sites along the
Mississippi River, such as the Waterman Site, the Mechigamea Village occupied between
1753-1765, reveal an equal concentration in ornamental goods – glass beads and tinkling
cones, for instance – and artifacts connected with hunting: brass projectile points, flint
knives, iron fleshers, gun flints.78 European and ceramic vessel shards are also prevalent. Of
some significance in this later Mechigamea site is the relative scarcity of agricultural
implements. The record can be read as a story of shifting subsistence activities.
Once French trade goods became available on the lower river – after the settlement of
New Orleans – the Mechigamea’s role as middleman traders collapsed. They abandoned their
permanent village in Arkansas, and although they made trips up and down the Mississippi to
visit and hunt, they substituted a trade in foodstuffs and furs for the pottery-horse-slaveFrench merchandise trade of the proto-historic period. Their role as hunters and meat/oil
76
These trade lists are furnished by Margaret Kimball Brown in her study, “Cultural Transformation Among the
Illinois,” pp. 149-150. Brown selected items on the lists for inclusion. Father Marest’s list appears in Jesuit
Relations, Vol. 66.
77
Broadswords and Bayonets: The Journals of the expedition under the command of Captain Thomas Stirling
of the 42nd regiment of Foot, Royal Highland Regiment (The Black Watch) to occupy Fort Chartres in the
Illinois Country, August, 1765 to January 1766. Ed. by Robert G. Carroon (Illinois: The Society of Colonial
Wars in the State of Illinois, 1984), p. 26.
78
See inventory comparison of Zimmerman, Waterman, and Guebert sites in Margaret Kimball Brown,
“Cultural Transformation,” p. 251.
150
procurers may have affected their subsistence agriculture as well. One indication of this in
the Chartres notarial records is a gradual increase in sales of Mechigamea Indian land to the
French, land granted to them by De Boisbriant in 1719. In this year, the French had been
expressly forbidden to settle on and farm lands given to the Mechigamea. A Jesuit, Father de
Ville, had even traveled “to Mobile to confer with Governor Bienville....” Records of the
Company of the Indies show the missionaries requesting that the French be kept out of Indian
villages. This proximity is phrased as “the French living pesle mesle with the Indians.”79
The Company complied by giving the Mechigamea their own grant. However, since the
edges of some French grants abutted the edges of the Mechigamea prairie, there soon began
to be haggling over the addition of small bits of Mechigamea land. As early as 1724 one
Charles Naut, a Frenchman married to an Indian woman, began farming land in the prairie of
the Mechigamea. The Indians enlisted the help of Father de Kereben to plead their cause, but
Naut was not stopped. The historian of the Jesuit missions in Illinois, Mary Borgias Palm,
points out that the Mechigamea grant yet existed in the early 1800’s, described in the first
surveys by Americans: “The tract of land laid down in the plat, bounded by the Coule de
Nau, the Mississippi, and the lower line of St. Phillipe’s, was reserved for the Mechigamea
Indians...and was never conceded away, either by the French or English government.”80
However much the Mechigamea resented Charles Naut’s incursions into their prairie, they
eventually began to use their land as a source of revenue. In 1737, for instance, a notarial
record refers to the sale of land owned by Jean Francois Becquet and his wife, Marianne
Fafart, to Hubert Finet. This piece of land, “one arpent of land in front, the depth being not
79
Mary Borgias Palm, Jesuit Missions, p. 54. Pesle mesle is the origin of the English phrase “pell mell.”
According to the etymology listed in the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 2004, it is
probably a reduplication of mesle, the imperative of mesler, to mix.
80
American State Papers, Public Lands, 2, p. 186, cited in Palm, Jesuit Missions, p. 55.
151
defined,” had originally been purchased from “Joachim the Indian,” making it clear the land
lay “in the prairie of said Metchigamia Indians.” The entry endeavors to clarify the terms of
the sale and refers also to earlier transactions in which Mechigamia sold land: “as long as the
Indians do not take it back by some caprice as the other land sold by them to other settlers.”81
In 1741 mention is made of land acquired from “one Chikagou Chief of the Indians,” “situate
in the low part of the prairie Mitchikamia.”82
Four years later another record presents a petition by some Chartres villagers to acquire
four arpents of land through a concession rather than a sale. An Indian “with pretension to be
the heir” claimed ownership of the land. The Indian is fully identified in the record as
Etienne Miaching8ia, “son of Joachim, formerly a chief of the Moinguenas [an early, small,
and quickly-absorbed Illinois tribe].” One revealing point about this petition is the reason
stated by the commissioners for granting the land to the French and not permitting
Miaching8ia to sell it: “the land is abandoned a number of years.” Four arpents of untilled
and “abandoned” land sitting next to their own farms may have grated on French
landowners.83 They continued to acquire very small pieces of the Mechigamia prairie. In
1746, Chief Chigagou again sold land, this time “a parcel measuring 220 paces...situate in the
prairie of the Metchigamea.” For these 220 paces, he received 200 livres.84 While French
landowners were neatening out the corners of their grants by edging into the Mechigamea
common fields, it is also true that the Mechigamea were using this land as a commodity to
raise cash.
81
See Record K-87 (H698) in Brown and Dean, The Village of Chartres, p. 425.
Record K-136 (H760) in Brown and Dean, The Village of Chartres, p. 485.
83
Record K-171 (H74) in Brown and Dean, p. 532.
84
Record K-181 (H1018) in Brown and Dean, p. 547.
82
152
The loss of agricultural land may not have seemed a problem to them, given their
declining numbers. The estimated population for their village fell from 1000 in 1723 to only
295 in 1752.85 For this decline, historians have proposed factors of disease, alcohol,
nutritional changes, subsistence shifts, and especially in the case of the Illinois Indians and
the French, the recruitment of warriors for European wars.86 (To this list for the Mechigamea
must be added a decimating attack on their village by the Fox, Sauk, and Sioux in 1752).
Concrete factors such as subsistence and food resource changes and natural environment
degradation become part of more abstract and complex variables; causal relationships likely
existed among all kinds of change encountered by Indians across the eighteenth century.87
The much lower numbers of the Mechigamea – and their willingness to sell their land – can
be understood also in terms of acreage productivity. According to studies of maize farming
by the Iroqouis and Eastern Woodland Indians, "Most investigators feel an acre of corn could
support anywhere from one to five individuals.” An early English observer and explorer,
Martin Pring, noted that “each Indian family cultivated an acre of ground.”88 The Public
Lands survey states that the Mechigamea grant eventually spanned 50 arpents, an amount of
land which would just about support an Indian village population of 300 (an arpent is equal
to approximately .84 English acres). As a broad generalization, the declining numbers of
Mechigamea may have also paralleled the erosion of their land, despite the statement in
85
Joseph Zitomersky, French Americans--Native Americans in Eighteenth-Century French Colonial Louisiana:
The Population Geography of the Illinois Indians, 1670s-1760s (Sweden: Lund University Press, 1994.), p. 321.
86
See Chapter Two, page 35, n. 21, on Emily Blasingham’s analysis of population decline among the Illinois
Indians.
87
Margaret Kimball Brown has confirmed these interdependencies by isolating 18 variables. She notes, “...it
may be that the size of settlement is not an independent variable, but has causal relationships with subsistence
movement and political flexibility. Size of settlement, therefore, could be considered a variable at a lower level,
an indicator.... ” Margaret Kimball Brown, “Cultural Transformation,” p. 248.
88
Martin Pring (1625) cited in Gordon G. Whitney, From Coastal Wilderness to Fruited Plain: A History of
Environmental Change in Temperate North America from 1500 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994) and Whitney, p. 102. See Whitney’s excellent discussion of Indian agricultural
practices, pp. 100-107.
153
Public Lands that the grant was never “conceded away.” It was, however, sold away. Yet
the Mechigamea were not affected in a vacuum. On the eve of the Seven Years War in
Illinois and on through the 1760’s, both these Indians and the French villages in the Chartres
area were losing people.
By the 1750’s, records are describing the selling (and abandonment) of entire French
farmsteads in the village of St. Philippe’s. Located north of the Mechigamea village and the
fort, St. Philippe’s suffered from marshy earth and periodic inundation. Records detail the
washing away of farmsteads there by the Mississippi. Property descriptions of sold and
abandoned farms consistently refer to land owned “in the prairie of the Mechigamea,”
making it clear that the Indians continued to own the land that lay between “the coulee and
the river.”89 Over the years, however, they had sold pieces of their land in the prairie to
French farmers. A re-created map, the Common Fields and Villages of Chartres, circa 1752,
clearly shows the “Mitchegamia Village” lying northwest, across the Coulee Deneau. This
village may or may not represent the new village the Indians constructed in 1752, after their
original village was decimated in a Fox attack. The land to the northeast of the village is not
labeled “the prairie of the Mechigamia.”90 Yet bounded by the great river and a coulee, the
“Indian prairie” continued to support Mechigamea, French farmers from St. Phillipe, and,
after 1752, some itinerant Peoria.
All across their concessions in the bottomland, the French labeled natural land formations.
Some refer to surnames, such as the Prairie Chassin or the Plains of Lafabut. Others seem to
identify peoples – “the Butte of the Cherakee” or historical events, as in Prairie L’Heurt
(Meadow of the Clash). One inlet of the Mississippi is often called “the Rigolet.” These
89
90
See record K-203 (H246) in Brown and Dean, The Village of Chartres, p. 587.
Map appears in Winstanley Briggs, “The Forgotten Colony,” p. 91.
154
French language terms appear to mean different things in different places and times; “the
Rigolet” also shows up in writing about Cahokia from the nineteenth century, identified by
one amateur historian as “The little stream known as Cahokia Creek.”91 In the eighteenth
century Fort Chartres area, the coulees Deneau and Rigolet and the ash grove, early described
in notarial records, perhaps functioned as a means of demarcation between the French and
Indian villages. A grove of untouched ash trees suggests this. For the French and likely the
Mechigamea, firewood was becoming a premium by the 1750’s. The correspondence of
Commander Macarty at Fort Chartres makes reference to the lack of fuel and wood along the
Kaskaskia River by 1752.92 Wood is noted as being “hauled” for lumber and construction,
and property inventories from as early as 1741 begin to assert that sellers of homes will be
taking with them their boards, door sills, window sills, and fences.93 It is surprising,
therefore, that the ash grove appears so consistently in the records across forty years: “the
hill of the ash grove,” “from the ash grove to the hills,” or “the coulee of the ash grove.”
Both white and green ash are trees of the Illinois bottomlands.94 Ash is a fairly hard wood
and burns with a btu of 20 per cord; this number places it seventh out of 16 on a list of
practical fuelwoods. (Shagbark hickory burns with the highest btu – 24.6 – while basswood
and aspen burn at only 12.6 and 12.5). Additionally, white ash is recorded as having a high
ease of splitting (as opposed to oak, beech, or elm, for instance, which are very hard to
91
J. Nick Perrin, The Jewel of Cahokia (Belleville, Illinois: Belleville Advocate Printing Co., 1936), p. 5. The
Grand Dictionnaire Francais-Anglais, 1864, defines a “rigole” as “a trench, a little ditch or furrow, drain,
gutter, (for water to pass in).” This definition seems to suggest a manmade waterway; both naturally occurring
feeder streams and constructed "rigoles" criss-crossed French lands.
92
See Macarty to Vaudreuil, March 27, 1752, in Theodore C. Pease, Illinois on the Eve, p. 557.
93
See notarial records K-128 (H568) and K-314 (H483) in Brown and Dean, The Village of Chartres, pp. 475
and 762. Wood use for the posts surrounding all French buildings, even henhouses, was very high. For example,
in 1725 in a house sale contract, the seller agreed to furnish the buyer with “six hundred posts to fence said lot.”
See Record K-14 (H154), p. 349. These posts were initially red mulberry; by the 1750’s, a stated preference for
cedar posts begins to appear in the records. One inference is the exhaustion of red mulberry in the bottomlands.
94
Robert H. Mohlenbrock, Forest Trees of Illinois (Southern Illinois University, 1975), pp. 73 and 76.
155
split).95 To the north of the Illinois settlements, the Fox Indians used the bark of white ash,
Fraxinus americana, in an infusion to relieve skin ailments such as sores and itching; such
knowledge may have been available to Illinois Indians as well.96 These qualities of ash
would have been attractive to both the French and Indians.
The presence of the grove is distinctive in the records. The Mechigamea Prairie was sold
off; the settlement of Chartres gradually filled in the lands around the fort; and its sister
settlement, Prairie du Rocher, established by a nephew of De Boisbriant on a generous grant
in 1718, also attracted many French. Yet the ash grove apparently was not cut down – or
utilized to an extent that it could not re-seed itself – by any of these peoples living in three
French villages, a fort, and two Indian villages. The heavy-crowned, golden-leaved autumn
trees of a mature ash grove would have made a striking natural boundary. Despite the
arguments from the French historian Giraud that the Mechigamea Indians resented being
isolated and separated in their riverine villages, the actual geography of the French
settlements suggests that natural markers like groves and coulees (feeder streams) were
comfortably used by both peoples.97 Perhaps the ash grove and the Coulee Deneau
somewhat prevented the intermixing of roaming livestock from both villages.98 A winding
path designated in the notarial records as “the path to the Mechy village,” led northwest
across the Coulee Deneau to the Mechigamea. There, along the river banks, these trading
peoples moored many river craft. They also had likely imparted their knowledge of the
Missouri-Arkansas lands across the Mississippi to the French. Their ties with the Quapaw,
for instance, are particularly important because the Quapaw were a Siouxan-speaking tribe
95
Gordon G. Whitney, From Coastal Wilderness, p. 212.
Frances B. King, Plants, People, and Paleoecology: Biotic Communities and Aboriginal Plant Usage in
Illinois, Scientific Papers, Vol. XX (Springfield: Illinois State Museum, 1984), p. 135.
97
See Marcel Giraud, A History of French Louisiana, V, p. 465.
98
See Chapter Three, pages 111 -115, for discussion of livestock foraging.
96
156
related to the Osage, Kansa, Omaha, and Ponca.99 Through the Mechigamea, knowledge of
Trans-Mississippi geography, trading options with other tribes, and possibly, other Indian
languages, would have been available to the French attracted to the fur-and-provisioning
trade. There is some evidence in the letters of Commander Macarty from Fort Chartres in
1752 that the Mechigamea maintained a particularly close connection with the Missouri
Great Osage. It was to the Mechigamea that the Osage “gave much in horses and peltries.”
Macarty felt that the Illinois Indians (the Mechigamea and Kaskaskia) tried to get the Osage
“to come closer to the French.”100 The population growth of the Chartres area (permanent
and peripatetic) can be linked to the twin acceleration of agriculture and skin/meat trade. This
in turn was due at least as much to the proximity of particular Indian tribes – prehistoric and
historic – as to the presence of the fort.
The decades between the setting up of the Mechigamea village and its destruction by a
party of Fox, Sauk, and Sioux in 1752 saw exchange, barter, and trade networks between the
French and the Mechigamea and the French and the Trans-Mississippi Indians become
enmeshed in the livelihoods of both peoples. Although the Jesuits had abandoned their
mission and chapel at the village in 1735 after the death of the resident priest, Father
Guymonneau, the Mechigamea were ministered to by the priest at the fort.101 The contact
with the French through the institutions of trade and religion affected native Indian crafts and
shifted the emphasis. By 1750, none of the Illinois tribes was producing any pottery of their
own, preferring to trade downriver with the Arkansas and Natchez Indians for ceramic
vessels and with the French for blue-and-white patterned faience. Along the shores of the
Mississippi, in a village established for over thirty years, Mechigamea Indians ate domestic
99
Dan Hechenberger, “The Metchigamea Tribe,” p. 1.
Macarty to Vaudreuil, September, 1752, in Pease, Illinois on the Eve, p. 680.
101
Mary Borgias Palm, Jesuit Missions of the Illinois Country, p. 56.
100
157
dog on French faience plates. Their homes, lodges of cattail mats draped over willow
frames, dotted a long, rambling shoreline clearing. While they farmed some maize fields in
their eastern prairie, keeping to rituals of March planting before the summer hunt, they also
likely manufactured bear oil. On the path that wound over the coulee and through the ash
grove, they passed daily to the village of Chartres and were often at the fort. A good many of
them continued in the Catholic faith as “praying Indians.” Mechigamea daughters lived with
Frenchmen, in sanctioned marriages and in unmarried liaisons, and bore them children.102
One of the distinctive patterns in French documents from the Chartres area is how often
Indians are mentioned, how much a part of life on the floodplain they were: they appear in
reference to trade interactions, land sales, visits to the fort, church sacraments, and casual
wilderness encounters. They frequently came as messengers taking letters between priests,
the Jesuits down in Kaskaskia, the Seminarians up in Cahokia; they also carried warnings,
information, and requests to the fort from both priests and resident military in other villages.
Their roles as emissaries and spokesmen for many tribes, including subtribes bound by
kinship and alliances to the north and east, brought them to Fort Chartres almost daily by the
late 1740’s. We find them detailed in the French language of 250 years ago, these domiciled
Indians of the Illinois: the mechy, the peor, the cohos, and the cusquskia. Coming and
going, members of these individual tribes would have been distinctly known, traveling on the
Chemin du Roi south to Kaskaskia or north to Cahokia. Given the small numbers of both the
Mechigamea and the French villagers of Chartres, it is likely these people knew each other
by face and name. In particular, the absence of all mention of Indian women in French
records, save fleeting and oblique reference to female Indian slaves, is a frustrating lacunae
102
For a thorough study of French-Indian liaisons along the Mississippi and the resultant kinship network, see
Tanis C. Thorne, The Many Hands of My Relations: French and Indians on the Lower Missouri (Columbia:
University of Missouri Press, 1996).
158
for historians. Yet familiarity and daily interaction do not translate into harmonies of
adjustment and loyalty. By the early 1750’s the trade matrix at Fort Chartres was severely
threatened, pressured from the East through a Miami-British trade alliance and from the
North by a resurgence of Fox-Sauk hostilities. Population pressure on natural resources was
also playing a role. Governor Vaudreuil in New Orleans cautioned the incoming Commander
Macarty Mactigue that “the garrison of the Illinois has frequent opportunities to get into bad
ways....” These bad ways apparently involved the soldier “of bad character” [selling] “his
flour for drink.”103 The convergence of these factors in the fall of 1751 and on through 1752
resulted in an explosive year in the Illinois Country.
103
Order of Command For Macarty, 1751, in Pease, Illinois on the Eve, p. 315.
159
French and Indian Counterpoint: 1751 – 1752
The history of the Illinois Country has been told in strands, with historians concentrating
on single populations.1 Primary accounts for much of this history include a reliance on the
observations of passers-through. Many travelers toured through the Illinois, from Charlevoix
and Andre Penicaut in 1721, followed by Bossu at mid-century, the British military,
engineers, and merchants in the 1760’s, to Victor Collot and Nicolas de Finiels in the 1790’s;
the records of Lewis and Clark begin in 1804. One clear pattern emerges from these
accounts, repeated in popular histories: the French are frequently treated as a single
population. Most ingrained in the American observations of the early nineteenth century, the
French of the Illinois were indolent and childlike people, who danced away their cares and
played cards on their shaded porches in the sultry summer months; French voyageurs often
engaged in heavy betting on a game called “loo.”2 Language describing French villagers,
from mid-century on, often includes the words “merry,” or “simple.” Illustrations in a 1976
special edition of the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society offer “Summer Evening
in a French Village,” a pencil sketch depicting heel-kicking French, metis, and a group of
watching Indians encircling a seated fiddler.
British and Americans alike were also contemptuous of French agricultural efforts. Carl J.
Ekberg cites many instances of American disdain for French agriculture, in which the
habitant farmers are labeled “non-progressive,” “stationary and retrograding,” or
1
See for instance, Mary Borgias Palm on the Jesuits; Carl J. Ekberg on the French merchants and farmers;
Wayne C. Temple on Indians and their villages; Margaret Kimball Brown on the Illinois Indians in particular
and Brown and Lawrie Cena Dean on French culture and the role of the voyageur; Reginald Horsman, Clarence
Carter, and Clarence Alvord on the British occupation; Theodore Calvin Pease on the French regime; Abraham
Nasatir on the Spanish in the Illinois; and Clarence Alvord on the “Virginia Anarchy” of the earliest American
influx.
2
History of St. Clair County, Brink, McDonough and Co., editors (Philadelphia, 1881), p. 59.
160
“defective.”3 In general, as the eighteenth century progressed, these characterizations of the
French and also, of the “degraded” Illinois, become more pervasive in the literature.4 It is
easy to forget the remarkable proposals of early French officials in the 1730’s that French
soldiers stationed in the Illinois “learn more about the tribe’s [Illinois Indians’] farming
practices” in hopes that these soldiers would stay on in the area after their tour of duty.5 In
contrast, studies of the French military, the colonial population posted to the remote Illinois
and trying to advance their careers, stress the industriousness, labor, “efforts,” and service to
the crown of these faithful officers.6 In these studies, at least, there is a marked difference in
characterizations of French military and French subjects. To weave all of these population
strands together in a single narrative for the course of the French Regime is daunting, yet it is
critical to emphasize that a myriad of populations was meeting every day in the Illinois
Country, especially in the vicinity of Fort Chartres, and that their interactions forged a potent
– if shadowy – history.
How did the people actually living along the Mississippi – who had lived there for many
generations – perceive and react to the events detailed by historians? In a single year there,
for instance, two violent attacks occurred, one on the French villagers and one on the Illinois
Indians. The French Commander, Macarty Mactigue, spent six months unraveling a
3
See this discussion on pages 180 –181 in Ekberg, French Roots in the Illinois Country: The Mississippi
Frontier in Colonial Times (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998).
4
See, for instance, D’Abbadie, the last governor of French Louisiana, writing in 1764: “The savages of the
different posts of the Illinois are reduced today to a very small number; war and tafia have almost destroyed
them.” Cited in Joseph Jablow, Indians of Illinois and Indiana: Illinois, Kickapoo, and Potawatomi Indians
(New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1974), p. 237.
5
Bienville to Maurepas, May 18, 1733, in Mississippi Provincial Archives, III, p. 614, cited in Raymond
Hauser, “An Ethnohistory of the Illinois Indian Tribe, 1673 – 1832,” unpublished doctoral dissertation,
Northern Illinois University, 1973, p. 108. Copy available at the Illinois Historical Survey in UrbanaChampaign.
6
A good discussion of the French population which examines these contrasts and provides texture is Walter J.
Saucier and Katherine Wagner Spineke, “Francois Saucier, Engineer of Fort de Chartres, Illinois,” in
Frenchmen and French Ways in the Mississippi Valley, edited by John Francis McDermott (Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 1969). See also the detailed analysis of French society and social rank in Winstanley Briggs,
“The Forgotten Colony: Le Pays d’ Illinois,” unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Chicago, 1985.
161
complicated Indian conspiracy. In that same year, French and Indian farmers faced a
devastating drought.7 Despite the effect on French wheat, the French military was asked to
oversee the first shipments of supplies and foodstuffs to other French forts, especially
Detroit.8 This pattern – of military supply convoys leaving Fort Chartres to provision French
forces to the east – would be the hallmark of Illinois French participation in the Seven Years
War. Meanwhile, emigration from Canada was continuing: also in 1752 Commander
Macarty received a petition from a Kaskaskia habitant who wished to settle his Canadian
stepsons in the area but had not enough land left to apportion out.9 Finally, among the
ordinary French people living around the fort, the buying and selling of property continued.
People arrived and people left. The rhythms of an agrarian community strongly meshed with
natural cycles of autumnal yield and fur harvesting can provide a counterpoint to the
dramatic events that make their way into the histories. There is so little extant evidence of
what the French – or Indian – people thought of the changes in their lives. An examination of
a single year can illuminate the experience of many diverse peoples in the Illinois, a year in
the ominous shadow of an approaching war.
The conflicts of 1752 signify an escalation in inter-tribal friction. While the analysis of
these conflicts here is primarily political, by 1752, the Illinois Country was beginning to
show evidence of fur and wood depletion, as well as thinning of game animals used for food.
Histories detailing the 1752 Fox attack often use phrases like “traditional enmity” or “age-old
hostility.” There was certainly this; yet the presence of a British trade center in the Wabash
River country, an intrusion far into traditional French territory, was creating not just new
7
Carl J. Ekberg, Colonial Ste. Genevieve: An Adventure on the Mississippi Frontier (Gerald, Missouri: The
Patrice Press, 1985), p. 20.
8
Clarence W. Alvord, The Centennial History of Illinois, Volume I (Springfield: Illinois Centennial
Commission, 1920), p. 238.
9
Ekberg, Colonial Ste. Genevieve, p. 21.
162
opportunity for trade; at Pickawillany, the Miami-British coalition offering generous, goodquality trade goods was acting as a stimulus on Indians who previously may not have hunted
aggressively in the fur trade.10 In 1750 Governor Hamilton of Pennsylvania noted the
movement of eastern Indians into the Wabash lands: “...Numbers of the Six Nations have of
late left their old Habitations and settled on the Branches of [the] Mississippi, and are
become more numerous there than in the Countries they left.” Hamilton felt that “these
Refugees,” the “Shawonese and the Delawares, with their new Allies the Owendaets
[Wyandots] and Twightwees [Miami], make a Body of Fifteen Hundred if not Two Thousand
Men....”11 What game reserves were feeding these newly-arrived Indians?
There is also evidence that the lure of British trade goods reached across the prairies to
Illinois. Some Illinois Indians had tried out the British market at Pickawillany. Parties of
hunting Kaskaskia, for instance, were far out on the north-central prairie when they were
approached by pro-British Miami Indians. Peoria Indians had begun to cross the Mississippi
into the fur-laden Missouri lands. Traditional analyses of Indians in the fur trade sometimes
imply that Europeans simply tapped into ongoing patterns of hunting and trapping. In the
Illinois Country in the 1750’s, European markets engendered competitive hunting among
tribes in a corridor of prairie and timbered river lands that was already thinned out. While
Richard White attributes a “wave of murders and attacks” on French traders in these years to
Indian frustration with French supply, the outbreak of violence may also have had another
cause. The geographic criss-crossing of tribes, factions, and remnant hunting parties who
10
See Richard White’s analysis of Indian discontent with the amount and quality of French trade goods at the
end of King George’s War (1744- 1748). White states that “By 1745, there were serious shortages of trade
goods in the West.” The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650 –
1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 199.
11
Hamilton to Clinton, September 20, 1750, in “An Anthropological Report on the Piankeshaw Indians,
Dockett 99 (part of Consolidated Docket No. 315, Dr. Dorothy Libby),” in Glenn A. Black Laboratory of
Archaeology, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.
163
were using the Grand Prairies increased because of the market polarity of Pickawillany and
Fort Chartres.12 The following narrative takes the intrigue to the local level, right to the
ground of the Chartres community.
In mid January of 1751, on the frozen ground of the floodplain, a group of Frenchmen
stood looking at a property in need of considerable work. Described as “a house of posts
stuck in the ground,” with outbuildings “badly-constructed,” the little homestead crouched
low to the earth. It had no upper story. While almost fenced clear round, this property in the
village of Chartres appears to have had little appeal. It sold for just 200 livres, payable in
“bills, bonds, or flour.” The owner was a billiard-keeper in Kaskaskia, selling his small,
indifferent house to a resident of St. Philippe du Grand Marais.13 A few months later, some
Canadian heirs in the village of Chartres sold off an arpent of ground “nearly covered over
with marshes and ditches.”14 While the French were selling and trading property, Illinois
Indians were becoming increasingly anxious. As the winter progressed and the Mississippi
lay plated with ice, a group of Peoria visited Fort Chartres with worries. They told
Commander Macarty they feared an attack by their northern enemies, the Fox and Sioux. The
Illinois had carried out a successful raid against these tribes earlier, killing seven important
members of both the Fox and the Sioux. The Sioux later stated to a group of voyageurs that
they were out to avenge the death of their “great chiefs.”15
12
Richard White, The Middle Ground, p. 200. Note also Governor Vaudreuil reporting in 1748 that “some
Shawnees” were “settled at the forks of the Wabash” in part “because of quarrels with other Indian groups.”
Vaudreuil cited in “An Anthropological Report on the Piankeshaw Indians, Dockett 99.”
13
Margaret Kimball Brown and Lawrie Cena Dean, The Village of Chartres in Colonial Illinois 1720 – 1765
(New Orleans: Polyanthos, 1977), Record K191 (H878), pp. 565-566.
14
Brown and Dean, The Village of Chartres, Record K-193 (H861), p. 569.
15
Letters of Commander Macarty Mactigue, cited in Joseph Jablow, Indians of Illinois and Indiana: Illinois,
Kickapoo, and Potawatomi Indians (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1974), pp. 216-217. For the most
comprehensive treatment of the vendetta between the Illinois and the northern tribes at this time, see Raymond
164
From that time in early 1751 until almost the same time a year later, no property changed
hands in the French villages; and the Indian villages lay in an uneasy peace. The summer
passed without incident, a strange, unnerving time in which escalating rumors reached the
fort of Fox raids from the north and anti-French activities to the east, among the Miami. The
Cahokia and some Peoria moved south to live at the Mechigamea villages for protection.
French farmers continued to tend their wheat and maize fields. In the fall, the land slowly
began to yield its natural fruit and nut bounty.
As equinoctial winds began to blow, the oaks most common on the floodplain, black and
bur oak, rained down an immense acorn crop. While black oak acorns are the least palatable
to animals, foraging hogs and some venturesome deer would eagerly seek out bur oak acorns.
However, the main nut harvesters were human. It was on the floodplain of the Illinois
Country that pecan, persimmon, and mulberry grew most profusely.16 Nut yields for the
floodplain forest have been estimated at 2,207 bushels per square mile for hickory and 3,395
bushels per square mile for pecan. On islands in the Mississippi, pecan harvest could amount
to 14,000 bushels of nuts.17 It is likely that both French and Illinois Indians were harvesting
these nuts, especially, perhaps, the Mechigamea, who lived close to the shore in two villages.
Their familiarity with the river and its food yield was documented in the early 1700’s. The
“walnut-tree” dugout of the Illinois Indian was described by both Father Charlevoix and
Deliette, who noted that there were as many as three dugouts in each cabin.18 Narrow, swift
and deep, these whole-tree craft could circle around nut-laden islands, moving easily under
Hauser, “The Fox Raid of 1752: Defensive Warfare and the Decline of the Illinois Indian Tribe,” Illinois
Historical Journal, Vol. 86, 1993, pp. 210 – 224.
16
April Allison Zawacki, Early Vegetation of Lower Illinois Valley; a study of the distribution of floral
resources with reference to prehistoric cultural-ecological adaptations (Springfield, Illinois, 1969), p. 60.
17
See Table 32, “Estimated Minimum Annual Nut Yields (In Bushels) Per Square Mile,” in Zawacki, Early
Vegetation, p. 63.
18
Charlevoix, Voyage, II, p. 238 and Deliette, “Memoir,” p. 340, cited in Raymond Hauser, “An Ethnohistory
of the Illinois Indian Tribe,” p. 148.
165
the thickety overhang of willow and elm. Black walnut (Juglans nigra) and pecan (Carya
illinoensis) were profuse producers of nuts, but the black walnut giants of the bottomlands
were coveted for the making of river craft. Walnut wood does not warp or shrink; it holds its
shape with a tensile strength and never splinters. The longer it is touched by human hands,
the more smooth, soft, and glossy the wood becomes. Such qualities must have been
perceived very rapidly by settlers, for the first colonists in Virginia were shipping it to
England as early as 1610. The wood of these early walnut harvests, taken from virgin
hardwood stands, was heavy, dark, and straight-grained. Illinois Indians looked for another
characteristic of floodplain walnut: these trees could reach heights of 150 feet, and often, the
first 50 feet shot straight to the sky without branching. Standing in the deep, fertile, loamy
soils of the river margins, mature black walnut trees would appear as dugouts upended to a
trained eye.19 The French rapidly learned the advantages of walnut as well, for early building
contracts in notarial records specify that barns and furniture be built of “walnut or sassafras.”
They chose walnut and oak for construction, but entrepreneuring French also sold pecans in
New Orleans, thus competing with the Illinois Indians as traditional harvesters.
In addition to natural nut and fruit crops, Indians and French alike were harvesting squash
and beans from their summer gardens; the French had planted and dried peas as well. The air
held a slightly smoky quality from the smokehouses where hams were curing, from the
village tanneries, and from the burning of the tallgrass prairies. On the bluff talus, as well as
the edgy fringe of forest clinging to the uplands, white walnut (butternut) and black walnut
formed groves of ragged yellow-green. Here and there among them, sassafras flashed
crimson, and liquidambar (sweet gum) spread its wine-colored, star-shaped leaves. The
19
Donald Culross Peattie, A Natural History of Trees of Eastern and Central North America (New York:
Bonanza Books, 1968), pp. 122- 123.
166
autumn foliage of the bluff crown was not dramatic, yet the deciduous trees clinging
intermittently among hill prairies slowly lost the virile green of deep summer. An amber pall
set in, streaked here and there by dark green cedars. And overhead, the southern migration of
waterfowl was common: the skies rang with cries and calls of trumpeter swans, snow geese,
Canada geese, and migrant grebes, as well as booming bitterns and many varieties of duck.
On December 8, 1751, the Jesuits would normally have been celebrating the Feast of the
Immaculate Conception of Mary with a special Mass. Whether this Mass was actually held
is not known, for the evening before, the French villages were attacked by a group of Miami
Indians and a few Kaskaskia, acting under the orders of the pro-British chieftain, La
Desmoiselle. In a happenstance of ironic timing, the new French commander, Macarty
Mactigue, arrived to assume his command of the Illinois Country on December 8 as well.20
As his convoy reached Kaskaskia, he stepped out into a crowd of distraught townspeople,
many from Prairie du Rocher. When Macarty debarked, he was fatigued; the rivers were low
and had been difficult to ascend. As the boatmen and soldiers alternately hauled and rowed
the heavy pirogues up the Mississippi toward the French settlements, Macarty certainly was
not expecting to find the inhabitants in a high state of alarm, only one day past an attack in
which a soldier lay scalped and Miami and Piankeshaw Indians, boarding in French homes,
had planned to murder their hosts. Macarty no sooner set foot on the landing at Kaskaskia
before he had to organize pursuit militia to fan out through the bottomlands. “On the ninth I
ordered a detachment of a hundred men,” he wrote to Governor Vaudreuil, “both regulars
20
Jean Jacques Macarty Mactigue was born in France “to a family of Irish military refugees.” He entered the
French Marines and rose through the ranks to become senior captain of the New Orleans colony by 1749. He
was appointed to succeed the Chevalier de Bertet as Commander of the Illinois in 1749 and served France
during the Seven Years War in Illinois. See William P. McCarthy, “The Chevalier Macarty Mactigue,” Journal
of the Illinois State Historical Society, Vol. LXI (1) Spring, 1968, pp. 41 – 57.
167
and militia, to give chase, counting on capturing those of the Indians who were wounded.”21
The day of the attack, two of Macarty’s boats had landed in an advance guard. It is not clear
from Macarty’s account if the soldiers in these boats participated in the initial exchange of
fire with escaping Indians, but Macarty reports that in the fray, “five Indians were killed and
four made prisoners, including Le Loup, chief of the Piankeshaw, another Indian from his
village, and two domiciled Illinois.”22 Despite the efforts of the mounted pursuit parties,
these Indian prisoners would comprise the entirety of the captured conspirators. Le Loup,
however, was no mean catch.
Originally a Kickapoo who had become a chief of the Piankeshaw, Le Loup has been
described as a “French partisan.”23 His record in the 1740’s and 1750’s reveals him to have
been, like many of the Indian leaders of the Illinois Country, caught in the commercial and
military rivalry between the French and the English, using the web of kinship and chiefdom
allegiances to negotiate for the best outcome in myriad, unpredictable circumstances.
Although his people lived along the Vermillion River in eastern Illinois – across the Grand
Prairie -- Le Loup was connected to the Illinois Indians living along the Mississippi. He was
one of a group of alliance chiefs circulating around the arch-plotter in the conspiracy of
December 7: La Demoiselle, also known as Memeskia or Old Briton.24
21
Macarty to Vaudreuil, January, 1752, in Pease, Illinois on the Eve; for description of the difficulty ascending
the rivers, see 432-433; for events of December 7, see p. 435. Pierre Rigaud de Vaudreuil became governor of
Louisiana in 1742 and then of Canada in 1755. He was the son of the more famous Vaudreuil, Philippe de
Rigaud de Vaudreuil, “chevalier and marquis, musketeer, commander of the troops, naval captain, Governor of
Montreal, and Governor-general of New France” between 1703 and 1725. Vaudreuil’s 23 years sojourn as an
early eighteenth-century governor saw the French Louisiana proprietary colony founded and struggling; the
proper placement of the Illinois Country was debated hotly under his regime and finally awarded to Louisiana.
See the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, Vol. II (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969).
22
Macarty to Vaudreuil, in Pease, p. 435.
23
See Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, empires, and republics in the Great Lakes Region 1650 –
1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 229.
24
See account of La Demoiselle under different names in Ian K. Steele, Warpaths: Invasions of North America
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 182. At least one historian, Fred Anderson, discusses the
168
La Demoiselle’s rise to power as a Miami chief (he was likely born a Piankeshaw) reflects
the internal splintering and factionalism within the Miami tribe, a complex history involving
the consistent mobility and relocation of tribes living in the Detroit area. Decisions to move
tribal villages to more advantageous locations did not simply reflect a state of “dependent
clientism,” as argued by some historians of the 1980’s.25 Reports in 1750, for instance,
indicate an epidemic along the Wabash near Ouiatenon, where many Piankeshaw had died.
They had set fire to their own village “to drive away the bad air,” and blamed the French,
saying it was “the bad medicine the French had thrown them which had made them die.”26
The turnover in French Canadian leadership between 1747 and 1755 was also a factor in
Miami disaffection. As the English began to press into the backcountry of Pennsylvania and
the Ohio Valley, winning tribal loyalties with rich trade goods and lavish presents, four
French governors in succession attempted to implement a sterner policy than the old, familiar
gifting-and-negotiating rituals best described by Richard White in The Middle Ground. The
new policy has been characterized as one of “humilia[tion], subjection...and naked force.”27
Perhaps the aspect of humiliation most rankled with the Miami. A visit to Quebec by the
Piankeshaw tribe, led by L’Enfant, ended badly. L’Enfant “had said everywhere that they
wanted to throw him into the sea at Quebec; that he and all those who had gone down with
him had been ill-received....”28 This story, that “M. the general at Quebec” wished to have
the Piankeshaw visitors thrown into sea, crops up often in L’Enfant’s narratives explaining
activities of La Demoiselle solely as Memeskia. See Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War
and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000), p. 25-29.
25
See for instance, Francis Jennings, Empire of Fortune: Crowns, Colonies and Tribes in the Seven Years War
in America (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1988), p. 50.
26
Reports to Raymond, March-April, 1750, in Pease, Illinois on the Eve, p. 174-175.
27
Ian K. Steele, Warpaths, p. 182.
28
Reports to Raymond, in Pease, Illinois on the Eve, p. 176.
169
why he rejected the French.29 Counterbalanced against gossipy personal tales such as these
were eye-witness reports flowing in from the upper Ohio Valley describing the winding
trains of heavily-laden English pack horses – “forty or fifty horse loads of goods” – reaching
the Upper Miami River in the vicinity where the Ottawa, Potawatomi, Detroit tribes, and the
Miami wintered.30 One historian writing about the thirty years following the Treaty of
Utrecht in 1713 has called the North Americans frontiers places of “aggressive instability.”31
It’s a succinct summation of a country of rapidly shifting alliances. L’Enfant, for instance,
has been characterized with the nebulous phrase, “His loyalty [to the French] was vouched
for at times.”32
La Demoiselle, however, remained vociferously and steadily anti-French. His sending of
conspiratorial wampum belts and mats to the Illinois Country to promote warfare against the
French settlements drew upon a kinship alliance with the Kaskaskia Indians. Their chief
Rouensa was brother to La Mouche Noir, a leading pro-Miami alliance chief; the followers
of La Mouche Noir lay among both the Wea and Piankeshaw, Miami tribes.33 While early in
the eighteenth century the Miami had sought the protection and trade advantages of the
French at Detroit, by the late 1740’s they had changed allegiance.34 As the territorial
competition for the rich North American fur and trade hegemony mounted between France
and Britain, leaders such as La Demoiselle, La Mouche Noir, and Le Loup watched. They
rapidly learned to exploit factions and allegiances to secure their own power.
29
See additional account in Pease, p. 173.
Ibid., p. 168.
31
Ian K. Steel, Warpaths, p. 165.
32
Theodore C. Pease, Reports to Raymond in Illinois on the Eve, p. 173, n. 1.
33
See Richard White’s discussion of kinship loyalties and political alliances among the lower Great Lakes
tribes, a pattern he calls “intermarried leadership,” in The Middle Ground, p. 212-213.
34
See, for instance, account by La Motte Cadillac of September 25, 1702, in which eighteen Miami came to the
fort at Detroit “on behalf of their tribe, to ask me for lands and to beg the savages who are there to approve of
their coming to settle there and joining them.” In Cadillac Papers, Portfolio 127, Document 45, Michigan
Pioneer and Historical Collections Vol. 33 (Lansing: Robert Smith Printing Co.), 1904, p. 138.
30
170
During the foiled attack on the French at Kaskaskia and Prairie du Rocher on December 7,
1751, the Miami and Piankeshaw Indians slipped down to the floodplain settlements on foot
from the top of the bluffs. The trees would have been stripped of leaves, making night vision
clearer and footing surer. In the course of interrogations carried out by Commander
Macarty, Indian prisoners stated they had come to the French settlements specifically to
acquire pirogues from the Kaskaskia Indians; they were preparing to sail south down the
Mississippi against the Chickasaw.35 This seems to have been a ruse; yet it was the means by
which a group of Indians arriving from the eastern Illinois Country – the home of the
“revolted” Miami tribes – passed into the French towns and apparently succeeded in
boarding with some of the inhabitants. In a later letter written by Governor Vaudreuil to
Rouille (the Comte de Jouy), he states that the Indians comprised “...a party of thirty-three
men from the village of the Piankeshaw and the Vermillion....”36 In reviewing the plot,
Vaudreuil also reflects, “It has been established that all the tribes of the Wabash with the
exception of the Kickapoo and the Mascoutens had entered into it, and all arrangements had
been made by La Demoiselle...the Illinois even appeared to be in on the plot....”37 Some of
the Indians pilfered small items and clothing from their hosts, as the interpreter Dodie, called
out to examine the body of a slain Indian, recognized items from his own home: “He found a
flint and steel which the Indian had stolen from his house. His bullets which had been made
some days since came from the magazine; he had a capot which had been stolen from a
boy...and various other trifles.”38 Indians boarding with the French in select homes around
the settlements were apparently to have risen up and killed the villagers; yet the fact that
35
See Le Loup’s statement to Macarty in Macarty to Vaudreuil, January, 1752, in Pease, p. 455.
Vaudreuil to Rouille, April 8, 1752, in Pease, p. 572.
37
Ibid., p. 574-575.
38
Macarty to Vaudreuil, January, 1752, in Pease, p. 434.
36
171
individual Indians felt compelled to steal confuses the picture somewhat. Le Loup’s eventual
explanation for what happened in the villages the night of December 7 was that “it is not you,
my father, who slays me; it is my young men.”39 The angry young men of the Piankeshaw
and Miami tribes become characterized in the correspondence of Macarty as “the madmen
among you.”40 Le Loup himself espoused this heartily: “Are madmen lacking in any of the
tribes? I do not know who these were.”41 This explanation for the perfidy of some Miami
remains a good part of the rationale for the conspiracy: younger, more volatile braves (such
as L’Enfant) were recruited and inflamed by La Demoiselle’s propaganda and threats, while
older, steadier chiefs warned them against hurting the French.
The involvement of some Illinois Indians in this plot has been indicated, but the overall
tribal allegiance of the Kaskaskia, Mechigamea, Cahokia, and Peoria does not appear in
question. During Macarty’s investigation, which lasted over the winter months of 1752, the
story came out that La Demoiselle’s agents and minions had approached various Illinois
tribes at their winter camps and tried every method imaginable to detach them from the
French. Such methods included direct threats. Macarty reports that Chareragoue, “an Illinois
of the Kaskaskia,” recounted the arrival in the Indians’ winter camp at Prairie de l’Orme of
two minions of La Demoiselle, bearing English blankets and a wampum belt. The
messengers spoke: “This signifies the blood we wish to shed. These are the words of the
great chief of the English who is preparing to attack the French with ten tribes, his allies. And
you Illinois, do you begin to go in search of that meat; and if you do not bring it, we will
39
Le Loup’s statement appears in Macarty to Vaudreuil, January, 1752, in Pease, p. 438.
See Macarty to Vaudreuil, January, 1752, in Pease, p. 447.
41
Le Loup, cited in Macarty to Vaudreuil, January, 1752, in Pease, p. 455.
40
172
begin on you. We are a thousand men with a great chief who spares no one.”42 Likely that
phrase, “we will begin on you,” caused unease at the winter camp. However, representatives
of the Kaskaskia and Cahokia swore to Commander Macarty that they had rejected the
English blanket: “It was a brown blanket, striped with seven red ribbons which they threw
down at my feet. They said they had been last spring to the English because it was said that
goods were cheap there...they would not go to the English again and thought no more of
them; they had French hearts and the French were their own blood.” The Kaskaskia chief
Thomas stated moreover that “the evil message that was reported to you, merely passed by
our village....”43 On January 12, twenty-one Peoria, “all chiefs or children of chiefs,”
marched down from the Illinois River to Fort Chartres to swear their allegiance to the French,
which they called “an ancient alliance.”44
References to ties by blood and to old alliances were real: the Illinois Indian tribes had
been intermarrying with the French along the Mississippi since before 1700. When the
Catholic Seminarian missionaries arrived at the Indian villages along the Illinois River in
1698, their first religious act was the baptism of a son born to a French soldier, La Violette,
and an Indian woman, Catherine Ekipakinoua.45 Parish registers at Kaskaskia and Fort
Chartres attest to both French-Indian marriages and baptisms; in the early years especially,
1720 – 1730, Indian women are appearing as godparents.46 Thus the Illinois Indians were
caught between two kinds of blood alliances: their daughters had married French soldiers
and traders for over fifty years and had borne their children; but they themselves shared
42
Words of Chereragoue, reported by Macarty, Macarty to Vaudreuil, January, 1752, in Pease, Illinois on the
Eve, p. 436.
43
Reported in Macarty to Vaudreuil, January, 1752, in Pease, p. 449.
44
Macarty to Vaudreuil, January, 1752, in Pease, p. 453.
45
Mary Borgias Palm, The Jesuit Missions of the Illinois Country 1673-1763 (Cleveland, Ohio: Saint Louis
University, 1931), p. 24.
46
See the parish records of St. Anne’s in Margaret Kimball Brown and Lawrie Cena Dean, The Village of
Chartres in Colonial Illinois 1720 –1765 (New Orleans: Polyanthos, Inc., 1977), p. 3 – 20.
173
kinship and chieftain ties with the pro-English or “revolted” Miami across the Grand Prairie.
In a letter of September 25, 1751, almost three months before the attack on the French
settlements, La Jonquiere, governor-general of New France, wrote to Rouille about the
activities of La Mouche Noir and La Demoiselle: “The English continue their devices to
engage the tribes to strike the French...La Mouche Noir has two of his brothers who are
chiefs of the domiciled Kaskaskia at Fort Chartres.”47 French leaders feared English
infiltration and influence along the kinship network that bound tribes diverse as the militant
Kickapoo and the farming, pacific Kaskaskia.
Through the early winter months of 1752 Macarty interrogated Le Loup. The fort was
visited by bands of Peoria and Kaskaskia who asked for the Piankeshaw’s release; Le Loup
remained in chains. In January there arrived from New Orleans a French surgeon, Michel
Gourdeau, who bought property in the town of Chartres from Joseph Buchet, “Principal
Scrivener of the Commissary Marine.” Master Surgeon Gourdeau acquired a mature, choice
property: “a house with...a yard, well, garden, fence and buildings and conveniences.”48 The
property was bounded to the rear by the glacis of Fort Chartres. Perhaps the new surgeon was
planning to minister to the French troops. In April of 1752, one Michel Lejeune sold a tract
in St. Philippe. The property and its buildings stood next to the King’s Road (Le Chemin du
Roi), the ancient road winding across the floodplain from Kaskaskia, rising through Le
Grand Passe to the bluffs, and continuing across the ridge prairies to Cahokia.49 As property
continued to change hands, French farmers drove their oxen out to the common fields,
hitched them to the two-wheeled plows (charrues) that later American settlers would call
47
La Jonquiere to Rouille, September 25, 1751, in Pease, p. 366-367.
Margaret Kimball Brown and Lawrie Cena Dean, The Village of Chartres, Record K-195 (H851), pp. 572 573.
49
Brown and Dean, The Village of Chartres, Record K-196 (H236), p.574.
48
174
“bare-footed carts,” and began to plow the black, winter-wet soil, still chilly as it was turned
up to the sun.50 In May, as the rising sap in the great trees of the floodplain turned the
prairies a bright yellow-green – especially noticeable in the venerable cottonwoods, green
before any other trees – the Mechigamea and Cahokia began to sow their fields. They had
agreed to farm communally that spring, “...in the fear of being attacked by the Foxes in
reprisal....”51
Neither a year of anxious alertness nor communal farming saved them.
On June 1, 1752, a party of four or five hundred northern Indians – Fox, Sauk, Sioux,
Potawatomi, Winnebago, and Menominee – sailed down the Mississippi to the shores of the
Mechigamea villages.52 As Le Loup spoke once again with Commander Macarty at Fort
Chartres, denying any plot to kill the French, northern Indian raiders set fire to at least twelve
Mechigamea cabins and then stormed the fields where Mechigamea, Cahokia, and some
Peoria were working. They “killed or captured seventy people, men, women, and
children...and scattered about the limbs of the dead.”53 They may have taken captive as
many as forty Illinois. On the recently sown fields, hilly with carefully-planted corn, lay the
severed arms, legs, and heads of the Illinois, rolling in the furrows. Perhaps Commander
Macarty walked through the ash grove and north along the Mississippi to personally view the
carnage, breathing the smoldering air of burning mat lodges and human flesh. The number
of Indians killed or taken prisoner was much larger than the number of French injured or
Indians killed in the fray of the preceding fall, when the Miami had attacked the French
villages. Yet no mounted French troops left in hot pursuit of the enemy; no call to arms was
50
Brink, McDonough, and Co., History of St. Clair County (Philadelphia: Brink, McDonough, and Co., 1881),
p. 31.
51
Macarty Mactigue, cited in Joseph Jablow, Indians of Illinois and Indiana, p. 216.
52
M’Skutewe Awandiangwi, Nipundikan puts the date of the attack as June 6 and the number of attackers at
1,000. See “The Metchigamea Tribe,” Vol. #1, 1997.
53
Macarty Mactigue, cited in Jablow, p. 216.
175
sounded. As the Cahokia “bewailed their relatives,” the devastated Indians regrouped in a
band north of the fort. They would construct a new village about a quarter mile from Fort
Chartres, “on a ridge in the midst of an open meadow.”54 Raymond Hauser points out that
the French government did eventually make efforts to arrange for the release of the Indian
captives, who were scattered among the different tribes of the attacking alliance. Over the
course of two years, nine captives were repatriated to the Illinois Country.55 However, at the
time of the raid itself, French soldiers were outfitting themselves to march on La
Desmoiselle’s trading town of Pickawillany.56 This effort, as well as the impending war with
the British, overshadowed the tragedy of the Illinois. That same June in 1752, French and
allied Indians would burn Pickawillany to the ground.57 Soon after, Le Loup would be
released from irons.
In July of 1752, an orphan, Etienne Gouremont, came of age in the small village of St.
Philippe. His guardian, Joseph Barron, agreed to let Etienne sell an inherited property, a
house that had belonged to Etienne’s father. The home, “one frame house de colombage
built on sills,” sat on a concession stretching back to the Mississippi. It was going to ruin
since Etienne was not living in it but with the Barron family. Etienne received two payments
for his property: one hundred francs “in flour, good and marketable on the day of All Saints
next,” as well as one hundred livres to be paid on All Saints Day, 1753. He left Fort Chartres
with his guardian after making the sale “verbally,” and declaring “that they do not know how
54
Description of the site is taken from Bossu, Travels in the Interior of North America, and Margaret Kimball
Brown, “The Search for the Michigamea Indian Village, “Outdoor Illinois, March, 1972, cited in Hauser, “The
Fox Raid,” p. 220.
55
Hauser, “The Fox Raid,” p. 218. Hauser presents an argument for the complicity of Commander Macarty in
the attack on the Illinois villages. His evidence is extremely circumstantial and ignores the year-long efforts of
Macarty to keep peace in the Illinois Country by interrogating rather than executing Le Loup.
56
Macarty, cited in Jablow, p. 217.
57
Richard White, The Middle Ground, pp. 230 –231. See also the account by Commander Macarty in Macarty
to Vaudreuil, September 2, 1752, Illinois on the Eve, pp. 680 –681.
176
to write.”58 They returned to St. Philippe along the Chemin du Roi. To the south, the village
of St. Philippe abutted “the prairie of the Mechigamea.” Somewhere on that prairie in 1753,
the Illinois Indians established the new village that would be known to archaeologists as the
Waterman Site. Conspicuous from this site, among all excavated Mechigamea village sites,
are iron knives, European ceramic and glass vessels – and gun parts and flints.59 Very few
agricultural tools or tool parts have ever surfaced from Waterman. There are no antler
digging tools or scapula hoes, although some iron hoes have been found. In addition to
suggesting a shift from agriculture to hunting and trading economy, the Waterman Site may
tell a story of increasing focus on protection and defense. When the British arrived in the
Illinois Country twelve years later, they found 650 warriors left in the Illinois Confederacy:
the Kaskaskia had 150 warriors and the Cahokia and Mechigamea, 40 warriors each.60
In the year 1679, the French explorer Tonty noted in “his book printed in Paris,” the
territory claimed to be have been conquered by the Iroquois Indians. The “Irocois,” he
wrote, had taken possession of virtually all the land in the Great Lakes area, and had
elsewhere “...conquered the Miamihas and the Illinois, Chavanoues [Shawnee] three great
Nations as far as the River Meschacebe.”61 In less than one hundred years, the great nation
of the Illinois was already endangered. From this point on, their history is a narrative of
mere survival.
58
Brown and Dean, The Village of Chartres, Record K-197 (H237), pp. 574-575.
See “Comparative Table 6: Native Materials and Technology,” in Margaret Kimball Brown, Cultural
Transformations Among the Illinois: An Application of a Systems Model (East Lansing, Michigan: Michigan
State University, 1979), p. 251.
60
See “Table 2: Population Figures for the Illinois,” in Margaret Kimball Brown, Cultural Transformations, p.
232.
61
See “Coxe’s Account of the Activities of the English in the Mississippi Valley in the Seventeenth Century, A
Memorial by Dr. Daniel Cox,” in Clarence Walworth Alvord and Lee Bidgood, The First Explorations of the
Trans-Allegheny Region by the Virginians 1650 –1674 (Cleveland: The Arthur H. Clark Company, 1912), p.
233.
59
177
The British in the Illinois Before 1770
Prologue: Provisioning a War
Another triad of Big River confluences became important to the French during the Seven
Years War. The “forks of the Mississippi” at the confluence of the Ohio, and, approximately
36 miles east, the mouth of the Tennessee River, created both danger and opportunity for
river transport. The long dip of the Tennessee, or Cherakee River as it was known at the
time, a curving spoon shape to the south, sheltered clusters of Indian riverine villages.
Chickasaw and Cherokee settlements dotted the banks of the Little and Big Tennessee
Rivers. Using these water routes that linked into the Savannah and hence to Charles Town,
these tribes had established a comfortable deerskin trade with the British. Contact between
the earliest English to penetrate this region and southern mountain-river tribes had begun at
about the same time as contact between the French and the Illinois Indians. In 1673 a few
English explorers reached Cherokee villages on the Tennessee and were amazed to find them
“already familiar with firearms.” Cherokee were using sixty flintlock muskets obtained
through trade with Spanish Florida.1 Ancient ties are sturdy ties. The consistently Britishallied tribes south of the Ohio used their intimacy with that watershed to harass the French by
water. A romanticized description of this activity occurs in an early Tennessee history: “In
their high mountains flanked by rivers, the Cherokees defended the eastern bastion, and from
it swept down the Tennessee in their pirogues, to harry the Illinois country.”2
1
See Donald E. Worcester and Thomas F. Schilz, “The Spread of Firearms Among the Indians on the AngloFrench Frontier,” American Indian Quarterly, Vol. 8(2) (Spring, 1984), p. 105.
2
Donald Davidson, The Tennessee: The Old River: Frontier to Secession, A Facsimile Edition of Volume 1
(Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1946), p. 96.
178
Using the broad, pacific Ohio to ascend towards Fort Duquesne, French supply convoys
sent out from Illinois had to pass the mouth of the Tennessee River. Cherokee warriors and
some Chickasaw easily ambushed the slow-moving, laden bateaux, and French military
became convinced that one day, the British themselves would be firing from the wooded
banks of the ‘Cherakaee,’ using the Tennessee River system to reach the Illinois Country. In
1757, under the command of Captain Charles Philip Aubry, they accordingly built Fort
Massac, originally Fort Ascension, on a spit of land on the Illinois side, “just below the
mouth of the Tennessee.” The earliest history of this area states that the site was the old
French Juchereau buffalo hide tannery, where a “trading post, fortlet, and mission” had once
stood.3 Construction was hasty and based on lumber to hand instead of the much more
durable oak growing on the uplands. Soldiers split water-loving cottonwoods and willows to
construct a typical small, bastioned fort. Predictably, within three years, Fort Massac was
rotting.4
Despite French fears of a combined Anglo-Indian invasion up the Tennessee, none
transpired. Indians acting alone did attack the French at this strategic point, however. In
autumn of 1757, a large band of Cherokees converged on Fort Massac; the Cherokee are
recorded as being put “totally to flight” by the garrison and its artillery.5 Cherokee attacks on
the French near Fort Massac occurred more frequently during the early years of the war and
before the official outbreak, as Illinois grain convoys were supplying inland forts beginning
3
O.J. Page, History of Massac County, Illinois with Life Sketches and Portraits, Part One – Historical (Massac
County, 1900), p. 26.
4
Norman W. Caldwell, “Fort Massac During the French and Indian War,” Journal of the Illinois State
Historical Society, Vol. XLIII (2) (Summer, 1950), p. 105 and 112, n.58. See also John B. Fortier, “New Light
on Fort Massac,” in John Francis McDermott, Frenchmen and French Ways in the Mississippi Valley (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1969).
5
See John A. Walthall, “French Colonial Fort Massac: Architecture and Ceramic Patterning,” in John A.
Walthall, editor, French Colonial Archaeology: The Illinois Country and the Western Great Lakes (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1991), p. 45.
179
in 1753. A total of fifteen men and two officers died near Fort Massac between 1756 and
1758.6 These men were casualties of the great Seven Years War that engulfed most of North
America above the Ohio River and which was fought out as well in Europe. However, the
Fort Massac deaths represent the closest the Seven Years War actually came to the Illinois
Country. The war drained men and supplies out of the Illinois, with “the grain crop...a most
important asset to the French.” One historian who has studied Fort Massac before the fall of
Fort Duquesne in 1758 concludes, “...the support and maintenance of the Ohio country came
to depend almost entirely upon the conveyance of Illinois flour and other provisions up the
Ohio River.”7 Fort Chartres participated in the war most dramatically at its very outset, when
a contingent of French Illinois soldiers ascended the Ohio to engage George Washington at
Fort Necessity.8
During the war years, there is little evidence of what the Illinois Indians were doing.
Some “Indian intelligence” enclosed in “letters from William Johnson to Jeffrey Amherst,
February 12, 1761,” described French efforts to influence the Illinois “to go to war with the
[recently-disaffected] Cherokee against the British.”9 These efforts were unsuccessful. In
1763 Captain Aubry wrote “An Account of the Illinois Country,” a document intended for
the incoming British officer Arthur Loftus. Aubry’s account mentions the subtribes of the
Illinois, especially the Kaskaskia, whom he characterized as “100 Warriors, but they are Idle
and very drunken.” Aubry felt there might be 100 French inhabitants left near Fort Chartres
6
Caldwell, “Fort Massac,” p. 107, n30, citing Kelerec Memorandum, Dec. 12, 1758.
Caldwell, “Fort Massac,” p. 104. See the thorough account of French Illinois expeditions and the few battles in
which French Illinois soldiers fought in Clarence Alvord, The Illinois Country 1673 –1818 (Springfield: Illinois
Centennial Commission, 1920), pp. 238 – 245.
8
See Margaret Kimball Brown and Lawrie Cena Dean, The French Colony in the Mid-Mississippi Valley
(Carbondale, Illinois: American Kestrel Books, 1995), “French and Indian War,” pp. 21-22; see Also Clarence
Alvord, The Illinois Country, pp. 238-239.
9
Cited in Norman Caldwell, “Fort Massac,” p. 113, n61.
7
180
and the “Indians which are called Metchis,” who numbered about “Forty Warriors.”10 Given
the amount of foodstuffs shipped out of the Illinois Country during the war, it is likely that at
least some of the Illinois were involved in the supply effort. Explicit mention of “fats” as an
item sent east on the convoys suggests bear oil; as many as fifteen bateaux carried flour,
“biscuit, maize, fats and bacon, tobacco, salt, and lead.”11 Supply shipments stopped after
the fall of Fort Duquesne in 1758; and after the surrender of the French at Montreal in 1760,
the Illinois began to experience a trickling out of people. Both French and Indians were
leaving for the Missouri lands across the river. Changes in the environment played a role in
the political shifts in the Illinois. These changes were well underway by the time the land
passed to British rule.
“It seems to be a crazy tottering situation at present....”12
While important histories of the British in Illinois have all stressed this attrition of peoples,
there is little analysis of environmental factors affecting the British experience.13 The
floodplain of Fort Chartres was in a depleted state in the fall of 1765 when British troops
finally arrived. In 1750, Father Vivier at Kaskaskia had pointed out that it was “usually
necessary to go one or two leagues to find deer, and seven-eight to find oxen [buffalo].”14
Fifteen years later, the emptying out of the Illinois Country was proceeding apace with both
10
“Aubry’s Account of the Illinois Country, 1763,” in Clarence Alvord and Clarence Carter, The Critical
Period 1773-1765 (Springfield, Illinois: Illinois State Historical Library, 1915), p. 4.
11
Norman Caldwell, “Fort Massac,” p. 104.
12
The Official Journal Kept by Lt. Eddington or the Surgeon,” in Broadswords and Bayonets: The journals of
the expedition under the command of Captain Thomas Stirling of the 42nd Regiment of Foot, Royal Highland
Regiment (The Black Watch) to occupy Fort Chartres in the Illinois Country, August 1765 to January 1766,
edited by Robert G. Carroon (Illinois: The Society of Colonial Wars in the State of Illinois, 1984), p. 91.
13
The major histories of Illinois under the British regime are by Clarence Alvord, Clarence Carter, and
Reginald Horsman.
14
Reuben Gold Thwaites, editor, The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, Vol. 69 (Cleveland: The Burrow
Brothers Company, 1900), p. 145. A French league is equal to approximately two and half miles.
181
fur-bearing animal and human numbers significantly lower. The gold of the Illinois – its
wheat and maize harvests – depended on human labor. In 1763, the French government had
expelled the Jesuits from its colonies, a reflection of the European hostility towards that
order. The leaving of the Jesuits from the Kaskaskia mission dissolved a rich agricultural
base including forges, wind and horse mills, wine presses, orchards, and a considerable
contingent of slaves.15 Prior to this date, the French military had continued to demand the
wheat harvest, packing milled flour in barrels for the long spring journey up the Ohio. At the
same time, supply convoys from New Orleans had stopped during the war. The result was a
string of decaying settlements in which a previously vigorous, integrated foodstuff
production system had ground to a halt. This was the riverine world to which British
soldiers finally came in 1765 to occupy newly-ceded lands; their ten-year stay in the Illinois
was impacted by a matrix of factors: a severe shortage of food, depopulation of both French
and Indians, the flooding of the Mississippi and subsequent waves of illness, deforestation
and wood scarcity, and the effect of buffalo migration and later, the intense competition for
buffalo meat by French and British hunters. These factors must be accorded a prime role in
the experience of the common British foot soldier at Fort Chartres, most of whom arrived
with preconceived ideas.
The enthusiastic endorsement in many travel and military accounts of the Illinois, some of
which at least was hyperbolic, may have created an unrealistic sense of the place in British
minds. British preparing to occupy Illinois may have conflated Edenic landscape with
opportunity and the pastoral signature of French Illinois with plenitude. The perception of the
Illinois as a fertile breadbasket was circulating in New Orleans for years before the British
15
See the detailed account of the Jesuit expulsion in Mary Borgias Palm, The Jesuit Missions of the Illinois
Country 1673 –1763 (Cleveland, Ohio: Saint Louis University, 1931).
182
occupation there.16 Although by the early 1760’s, the Illinois was so depleted of manpower
that it was sustaining only itself, the perception of abundance up in the Illinois Country was
deeply ingrained. Only official letters and dispatches remain to detail the British view of
country they won, but in the taverns of New Orleans, along the great city levee already
notorious for its “bad influences,” British soldiers mingled with French inhabitants as well as
French soldiers leaving from the Illinois. The stories were circulating: rich country, black
earth, vast herds of game, and murderous Indians. A study of British expectations running
aground on Illinois reality starts with changes in the natural world the British would
encounter in 1765.
As tensions increased in the Illinois before the outbreak of war in 1756, and as the war
itself changed patterns of movement between the Illinois and the Ohio Valley, the earth itself
was also changing. Dynamic shifts in the course of the Mississippi River worked
oppositionally to the drying out of some parts of the bottomland. Wheat and corn crops,
plowing, harvesting, and the grazing of animals had reduced the luxuriant, often rotting
vegetative cover of the land. The steaming, rank-smelling floodplain grasses had protected a
shimmering, watery surface. Without this heavy green blanket, the earth could be seared by
steady sun. In addition, deforestation, the stripping of forested areas that had formed the
patchy, mosaic quality so consistently described by observers, had likely created both drying
and erosion. Hints of these processes can be found in notarial land records.
In addition to the shifts in the course of the river and its effect on the village of Chartres,
there is some evidence that French fields were beginning to show evidence of soil
exhaustion. French farmers did not consistently enrich their land with manure, except
16
See the discussion in Carl J. Ekberg, French Roots in the Illinois Country: The Mississippi Frontier in
Colonial Times (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), pp. 223-225. Ekberg documents the reality of warstressed New Orleans: a city desperate for foodstuffs from the Illinois, which were scant or unavailable.
183
through the process called l’abandon, the turning out of domestic animals onto harvested
fields.17 Neither did French farmers practice crop rotation, even with well-known soil
enhancers like clover.18 The repeated inundations at mid-century may also have contributed
to changes in the soil. At least one British observer wrote in 1766 that “the soil in the Illinois
Settlements is not so good as at any place of the places I have already Named owing perhaps
to the Quantity of Sand mix’t with it by the Mississippi.…”19 By the time the 1763 Treaty of
Paris altered the political face of the Illinois Country, the natural economy had been eroding
for at least ten years. In addition to the interruption of trade and consumer goods throughout
the Seven Years War, the sixty miles of riverine French settlement had also experienced soil
exhaustion, flooding, sickness, deforestation, declining Indian populations (directly affecting
the provisioning trade), and changes in hunting, involving new and exploitative patterns. The
eighteenth century environment provides a record of these processes, reflecting to the
incoming British a strange world of potential wealth in a depauperate land.
The first and most important change in the Illinois can again be traced to the action of
water. In 1751, the owner of land in the parish of St. Anne’s adjoining Fort Chartres
petitioned to auction off one of his arpents. The Canadian heir to this property had
discovered that “a piece of ground of one arpent in front by the depth hereafter designated,
being nearly covered over with marshes and ditches; the expense of the fences which it
17
For l’abandon, see Carl J. Ekberg, French Roots, pp. 115-118.
See Carl J. Ekberg’s discussion of possible soil exhaustion on the eastern shores of the Mississippi in
Colonial Ste. Genevieve: An Adventure on the Mississippi Frontier (Gerald, Missouri: The Patrice Press, 1985),
p. 20. Ekberg also points out the subdivision of large French farms through filial inheritance. French Canadians
were beginning to emigrate to the Illinois, often sons and daughters from previous marriages. One petitioner to
the French Commander Macarty in 1752 mentions “the large number of children [near Kaskaskia].” See
Ekberg, p. 21. Macarty also uses the French word, “fatiguee” (exhausted) to describe the French farm lands.
However, such observations must be kept in the context of the year 1752, when a major drought stressed the
area.
19
Fraser to Haldimand, May 4, 1766, in Clarence Alvord and Clarence Carter, The New Regime 1765-1767
(Springfield, Illinois: Illinois State Historical Library, 1916), p. 227.
18
184
would be necessary to keep up and to build would be greater than the worth of the land....”20
Buried in notarial records, this entry presages the years to come before the British arrived in
1765, debarking from batteaux into a land being re-defined by water. The last entry in the
Chartres notarial records, June 29, 1765, describes the posting at auction, on the gates of the
church after high mass, of a property in the village: “...said house situated in the territory of
New Chartres near the Fort and the river, falling to ruins by the falling down of the bank, and
of which if left where it is, would certainly be washed away by the Mississippi.”21
Because
of the general moisture level in the soils of the Chartres plains, wooden houses there lasted
only twenty years. 22 And close by, to the south, the settlement of Prairie du Rocher was built
of lime and stone houses, perhaps a conscious choice of the inhabitants, who had moved their
town to the sheltering base of the cliffs after a serious flood.23 The French had learned to
replace their posts and palings, to use limestone from the cliffs, to move dwellings inland –
yet they still contended with the Mississippi. One historian who has made comparative
studies between original French grants in 1722 and 1734 and the American Public Lands
surveys of the early nineteenth century concludes, “Mississippi floods annually lessened the
acreage of the original grants...by 1760, the French who had been given land in 1722 or as
late as 1734 had lost more than half of it to the new river channel.”24
In 1785, known as “Annee des Grandes Eaux,” or “the Year of the Great Waters,” the
entire bottomland stood under so much water that men rowed boats up and down the floating
20
Margaret Kimball Brown and Lawrie Cena Dean, The Village of Chartres in Colonial Illinois 1720 – 1765
(New Orleans: Polyanthos, 1977), Record K-193 (H861), p. 569.
21
Brown and Dean, The Village of Chartres, record K-340 (H523), p. 804.
22
Maragret Kimball Brown and Lawrie Cena Dean, The French Colony in the Mid-Mississippi Valley
(Carbondale, Illinois: American Kestrel Books, 1995), p. 9.
23
T.P. Fadler, “Memoirs of a French Village: A Chronicle of Old Prairie du Rocher 1722 - 1972” (selfpublished manuscript, 1972), p. 17. Copy in Illinois Historical Survey.
24
Natalia Belting, Kaskaskia Under the French Regime (New Orleans: Polyanthos, 1975), p. 53.
185
prairies. The Mississippi rose “twenty feet above the known highest water marks.25 There is
some suggestion of a similar flood in the 1740’s. Perhaps this flood initiated a change in the
river’s course: the west wall of Fort Chartres, the impressive limestone walls built by the
French engineer Saucier under the direction of Commander Macarty in the early 1750’s, was
threatened and eventually undermined by the river while the British were in Illinois. In 1766,
Captain Harry Gordon visited the fort with an assistant British engineer and wrote a
considerable description of its incipient collapse. He also furnished specific suggestions on
how to prevent the erosion, including, “driving a Number of Button Wood short stakes in the
Slope, which immediately take root, and [get] together floating Trees and any Thing else of
that Kind the Floods bring down….”26 Gordon had a low opinion of the French efforts to
save the fort. He mentions that they had “fascined and piled the banks, but the Torrent soon
got Passage behind them.”27 Button Wood trees are sycamores, rarely mentioned in any of
the accounts of the trees growing in the French bottomlands. While water-loving and
sprouting often in large numbers along streams, sycamores do not seem to have been
preferred by the French. The British may have been introducing the idea of using sycamore
seedlings in flood control.
The Mississippi River was moving inland at a rapid pace, however. In 1765, Captain
Philip Pittman, arriving in the Illinois Country with Major Farmar, described the Mississippi
as lying “next to the Fort...continuing falling in.” A sandbank rising from the thickety shore
shallows had become an “island of willows.”28 Pittman made a distinction between the two
25
See account by August Chouteau before Theodore Hunt, Recorder of Land Titles, April 18, 1825, in John
McDermott, Early Histories of St. Louis (St. Louis: St. Louis Historical Documents Foundation, 1952), p. 92.
26
See “Captain Gordon’s Journal,” August 20, 1766, in Alvord and Carter, The New Regime, p. 298.
27
Ibid.
28
Philip Pittman, The Present State of European Settlements on the Mississippi (Cleveland: The Arthur H.
Clark Co., 1906), p. 88.
186
villages of Prairie du Rocher and Chartres. Prairie du Rocher, he wrote, was a “small village”
of twelve houses, whose inhabitants were “very industrious.” They had “every kind of
stock.”29 The village of Chartres near the fort, however, once prosperous with 40 families,
was “abandoned to the west side of the river except for three or four poor families.”30 As
early as 1752, Commander Macarty at Chartres had written to Governor Vaudreuil in New
Orleans, “We need inhabitants here, and each inhabitant is a soldier who costs the king
nothing. This country lacks strength, and it is not so well settled ...the children don’t replace
their fathers as one sees from the abandoned farms.”31 Captain Gordon sent his plan to
buttress the banks near the fort with “Button Wood stakes” to the British engineers, but he
also despaired in his journal of organizing a work detail for the fort. “The Sickly State of the
Troops did not allow of getting any Number to work during my stay, nor was the Water low
enough or the Heats abated to make much work otherwise advisable.”32
Fever and sickness along humid river bottoms, intensifying as temperatures and water
levels rose farther south, comprise a familiar theme in settlement history on the eastern and
southern coasts and in the major river valleys of the North American interior. Both malaria
and yellow fever are vector-born diseases spread through the bite of infected mosquitoes.
Three species especially infest watery places in Illinois, Aedes vexans, Anopheles
quadrimaculus, and Culex pipiens; the latter is a dangerous carrier of St Louis encephalitis,
while Anopheles carries malaria.33 The life cycle of some species of floodplain mosquitoes
29
Pittman, The Present State, p. 87.
Pittman, The Present State, p. 90.
31
Macarty to Vaudreuil, January, 1752, in Theodore C. Pease, Illinois on the Eve of the Seven Years War
(Springfield, Illinois: Illinois State Historical Library, 1940), pp. 468-469.
32
Op. Cit. “Journal of Captain Gordon,” p. 298-299.
33
For a good discussion of the differences among these species, see Craig Vetter, “Bloodsucker Zen,” in
Chicago Wilderness, Spring, 2004, Vol. VII (3), p. 17.
30
187
reveals an adaptive dependence on intermittent flooding.34 Aedes vexans is a widespread pest
mosquito, a floodplain insect laying its eggs on soil often subject to inundation, but on soil
that is at the time of ovipositing, “neither water-logged nor flooded.”35 The eggs will hatch
when inundated by flood waters, due to a particular bacterial action in the waters surrounding
the raft of eggs. Such action can occur only at times of flood or very high water. On the
upper Mississippi, serious flooding was much less common than in the lower river delta.
There, both the French and the Spanish civil governments enacted rigorous laws requiring
land owners to build and maintain a levee system to protect the riverine fields from annual
floods.36 The first levees appeared near New Orleans in 1731.37 No such laws were required
for the Illinois colony, although the Mississippi flooded severely at least once a decade.
The references to fever and sickness in the American Bottom suggest that newly-arrived
men and women were contracting malaria and additional “malignant” fevers such as forms of
encephalitis.38 But not everyone who arrived fell ill with fever. The intermittent quality of
“sickening” across the American Bottom settlements suggests a possible connection with the
life cycle of Aedes vexans or Anopheles deluvialis. These mosquitoes seek and prefer a
specific riverine environment in which sporadic flooding over the previous high water mark
triggers egg-hatching. Field entomologists have vividly described the bottomlands of the
Mississippi in Illinois, most especially the mercurial quality in which the floating in of debris
34
Truls Jensen, Paul E. Kaiser, and Donald R. Barnard, “Adaptation to Intermittently Flooded Swamps by
Anopheles quadrimaculus Species C1 (Diptera Culicidae), Environmental Entomology, 23(5), 1994, p. 1150.
This study describes the ovipositing and hatching behavior of a species of mosquito in Florida; however, many
species of floodplain mosquitoes inhabit river valleys in North America, including the Upper Mississippi.
35
William R. Horsfall, Robert J. Novak, and Forrest L. Johnson, “Aedes vexans as a Flood-plain Mosquito,”
Environmental Entomology, Vol. 4, No. 5, October, 1975, p. 675.
36
Helmut Blume, The German Coast During the Colonial Era, 1722-1803 (Geographisches Institut der
Universitat Kiel, Germany, 1956). Translated and edited by Ellen C. Merrill (Destrehan, Louisiana: The
German-Acadian Coast Historical and Genealogical Society, 1990), p. 79.
37
Rivers of North America, edited by Michael P. Dineen et al (Waukesha, Wisconsin: Outdoor World, 1973),
pp. 43-44.
38
Claudia M. O’Malley, “Aedes Vexans (Meigen): An Old Foe,” Proceedings of the N.J. Mosquito Control
Association, 1990, pp. 90-95.
188
and upstream flood detritus creates sandy, decaying islands.39 Such a morass was observed
in 1766 by Lieutenant Eddington, who described the woody banks of the Mississippi as
“…full of Cane, brambles, bullrushes, and underbrush so that it’s very difficult to make one’s
way through them.”40 Almost eighty years later in 1842, Charles Dickens, touring the
American Bottom, described a similar environment: “… though the soil is very rich in this
place, few people can exist in such a deadly atmosphere…On either side of the track, if it
deserve the name, was the thick “bush,” and everywhere was stagnant, slimy, rotten, filthy
water.”41 It is just such an environment that attracts female floodplain mosquitoes. Despite
eye-witness accounts of saturation, the best evidence that the French and Indians along the
Mississippi were not contending with yearly floods lies in the way they fenced their animals
along the river banks. In interviews with early American settlers in the old French
bottomlands, prior to 1813, for example, witnesses attested that “horses ran in large droves in
the canebrakes along the Mississippi River.”42 When Captain Stirling’s party arrived at the
mouth of the Kaskaskia River on October 10, 1765, Lt. Eddington recorded that they could
see “the Horses and Cattle of the Village of Kuskusquias galloping about and some basking
in the Sun on the opposite bank of the river.”43 As in the early days of the first and second
Fort Chartres, the rivers, both the Mississippi and the Kaskaskia, were still providing one half
of a natural fence line, and animals were not considered at risk from constant flooding.
39
See Horsfall et al, “Aedes vexans,” p. 675.
“The Official Journal Kept by Lt. Eddington or the Surgeon,” in Broadswords and Bayonets, p. 77.
41
Charles Dickens, cited in William I. Woods, “Changes in the Landscape of the American Bottom – A.D.
1000 to Now,” Paper presented in a Roundtable Symposium: Changes in the Landscape: The Lower Valley and
Elsewhere – A.D. 1000 to Now at the Joint Meetings of the Southern Archaeological Conference and the
Midwest Archaeological Conference, Lexington, Kentucky, November 11, 1984.
42
Nehemiah Matson, Pioneers of Illinois containing a series of sketches that occurred previous to 1813
(Chicago: Knight and Leonard, Printers, 1882), p. 114.
43
“Journal of Lt. Eddington,” in Broadswords & Bayonets, p. 79.
40
189
The historical accounts of French Illinois contain a mixed record of elegiac endorsement
of “healthful” climate and references to virulent fevers. As late as 1790 the first Territorial
Governor of the Old Northwest, Arthur St. Clair, wrote in a report on the Illinois Country to
President Washington, “...the situation is high, the air pure and healthy, and the soil
good....”44 Yet sixteen years earlier, in 1774, the French Canadian trader Charles Gratiot
wrote to his father that the Illinois Country was “[a] part of Louisiana, an extremely hot and
feverish country –”45 The intermittent nature of upriver flooding and subsequent anopheles
hatchings help to explain these contradictions across the eighteenth century. The correlation
between the high water advance of the Mississippi and the sickening of British soldiers after
1764 is suggestive. In the year 1766 many persons arriving to the floodplain were stricken
with illness. Captain Harry Gordon’s journal states that on September 8, while preparing “to
descend the Mississippi…I was seized with a Fever which continued with Unremitting
Violence until the 16th at Night.”46 George Croghan writing from Fort Chartres a few days
later, on September 10, admitted, “I have been so ill this fortnight past that I have not been
able to write…As I am reduced in Sickness, I shall be obliged to go round by New Orleans,
as I’m not able to ride a Cross the Country to Fort Pitt.”47 Along with problems of food
supply, nutritional deficiency, and trade shifts caused by French and Indian populations
crossing the river to the French settlements on the Spanish side, outbreaks of debilitating
fevers were part of the British experience in Illinois.
44
The Arthur St. Clair Papers, Vol. 2, cited in John White, Early Accounts of the Ecology of the Big Rivers Area
(Springfield, Illinois: Illinois Department of Natural Resources, 2000), p. 43.
45
See “A business venture at Cahokia: The Letters of Charles Gratiot, 1778-1779,” in John McDermott, editor,
Old Cahokia, cited in White, Early Accounts, p. 37.
46
“Journal of Captain Gordon,” in Alvord and Carter, The New Regime, p. 301.
47
Croghan, cited in “Journal of Captain Harry Gordon,” in Newton D. Mereness, Travels in the American
Colonies (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1916), p. 478, n. 1.
190
An irony in the timing of the British arrival concerns the polar forces of riverine
destruction and economic development. Despite references in records and correspondence to
inundation, erosion, and the washing away of farms, notarial descriptions also reveal a steady
maturation of property. French farms auctioned off in the 1750’s and 1760’s, abandoned, or
sold to members of the French marine garrisoned at Chartres are extensively delineated and
inventoried. These properties are replete with many wooden structures, including pigeon
coops, windmills, smokehouses, hen houses, barns, and horsemills. Their crops and gardens
are specified, including fruit trees or orchards.48 The Kaskaskia Manuscripts detail the sale
of a large farm at St. Philippe in 1759 “...consisting of a stone house, barn, stable, a horse
mill, a water mill, a saw mill, livestock, 1 slave, 3 arpents of land in the village of St.
Philippe, and all furnishings.”49 At Prairie du Rocher in 1760, there occurred a sale at public
auction “of a house, its outbuildings and ½ square arpent lot, a tannery on ½ an arpent with a
mill and 160 tanned hides of buckskin, bear and other hides.”50 Property was changing hands
across the decade before the French gave up their claim to Illinois. Small numbers of arpents
– usually three or four – were being sold, auctioned or abandoned, and on these arpents stood
the structures of an interdependent trade world – horse and water mills, tanneries, and forges.
At the same time, the references in notarial and commercial records to the presence of water
are difficult to ignore. Watery earth no longer farmed or grazed would invite the return of
48
In 1763 a traveler, “Mr. Hamburgh,” observed that the French settlements in the Illinois “…Produces Some
fruit: Apples, Pears, Quinses, and Peaches. The land is low And the Missippi [sic] Gennerally over flows in
June; the Excessive Heat that followeth afterwards occasioneth the fevers to Be Very frequent.” See “Minutes
of Mr. Hamburgh’s Journal,” 1763, in Mereness, Travels in the American Colonies, p. 364. French orchards at
Detroit were described by the British as containing “several hundred of fruit trees.” Their apple varieties
included Detroit Red and Pomme de Neige. Information gathered anecdotally from “old people” suggests these
fruit trees were originally obtained from Montreal, and before that, from Normandy and Provence. See
Michigan Pioneer & Historical Collections, Vol. 1 (Lansing: W.S. George & Co., Printers and Binders, 1877),
p. 355.
49
Kaskaskia Manuscripts 59:12:17:1
50
Kaskaskia Manuscripts, 60: 1:13:1
191
some pre-settlement features. By the 1790’s, when the French spy Victor Collot toured the
bottomlands, a natural recovery process was evident.
South of Prairie du Rocher, between the village and Kaskaskia, lay broad, rich southern
meadows repeatedly remarked on by the arriving British in the mid 1760’s. The surgeon
traveling with Captain Stirling’s detachment of the Black Watch Regiment wrote in 1765,
“From this Village [Kaskaskia] there is a good Waggon Road to Fort Chartres, distant
eighteen miles, at least two thirds of which is through natural meadows without a single Tree
in them, and fine long Grass in them and little runs or brooks here and there intersecting
them.”51 Thirty years later the “natural meadows,” maintained for years through autumnal
burning and especially, the grazing of livestock, evinced a rampant transformation. Collot
noted that the “vegetation along Kaskaskia Road is so luxuriant a man on horseback is
covered.” He mentions grasses 21 feet high.52 At Fort Chartres, he noted foundational ruins
as lying half a mile from the long-deserted village of Chartres, the old town site “covered
with wild herbs.”53 Between the fort ruin and St. Philippe, seven miles to the north, “space is
intersected with woods, with natural meadow, and some marshes, which render St. Philips
unhealthy.”54 Up at Cahokia, crossing the Meadow of the Bridge, Collot wrote, “The whole
of this space is intersected with large ponds, some of which are three or four miles long, and
are broad: these stagnant waters occasion, by their exhalation, many fevers, and on this
51
See “The Official Journal Kept by Lt. Eddington or the Surgeon,” in Broadswords & Bayonets, p. 90.
Victor Collot, A Journey in North America. Containing a survey of the countries watered by the Mississippi,
Ohio, Missouri, and other Affluving Rivers; with exact observations on the course and soundings of these
rivers; and on the towns, villages, hamlets, and farms of that part of the New World; followed by philosophical,
political, military, and commercial remarks and by a projected line of frontiers and general limits (Firenze,
Italy: O. Lange, 1924), Vol. 1, p. 239-240.
53
Ibid.
54
Victor Collot, A Journey, 241.
52
192
account, the Meadow of the Bridge is very little peopled, the greater part of the inhabitants
having gone over to the Spanish side.”55
Historians have usually interpreted the abandonment of the French settlements by 1765 as
an exodus west across the river, fueled by fear of British rule. The inhabitants were
certainly still leaving when the British arrived; Captain Thomas Stirling, the first commander
to successfully reach the Illinois and oversee the changing of international flags at the fort,
despaired of his ability to keep the French there. He wrote to Commander Thomas Gage in
December, 1765, “This settlement, has been declining Since the Commencement of the War,
and when it was Ceded to us, many Familys went away for fear of the English….” Later in
the same letter he describes the stealth of this leaving: “I wrote your Excellency that few or
none had given their names, to go away, which made me hope they intended staying,
but…many of them drove off their Cattle in the night and carried off their Effects and grain,
which I did everything in my power to prevent.…”56 An early history of Randolph County
states that “most of the Metis population {half-breed}” crossed to Missouri with the
Mechigamea in 1765.57 Yet the consistent sales and auctioning of property in the French
settlements during the 1750’s suggest that other forces may have been at play, connected to
resource exhaustion. The British officer who succeeded Stirling at Fort Chartres, Lieutenant
Fraser, wrote to General Haldimand in May of 1766 that he was having trouble determining
the number of French inhabitants at the Illinois, “as they are going & coming Constantly to &
from the Indian Nations, as others are from New Orleans to the Illinois.…”58 To the British,
the Illinois was a world in flux.
55
Victor Collot, A Journey, 242.
Stirling to Gage, December 15, 1765, in Alvord and Carter, The New Regime, p. 125.
57
Glenn J. Speed, Ghost Towns of Southern Illinois (Royalton, Illinois: Glenn J. Speed, 1977), p. 172-173.
58
Fraser to Haldimand, May 4, 1766, in Alvord and Carter, The New Regime, p. 231.
56
193
In particular, two sets of conflicting information form strong themes during the British
occupancy of Illinois. While incoming British accounts are uniformly glowing and admiring
of the fertility of the Illinois Country – its beauty, the animal, bird, and fish plenitude – the
records, letters and the behavior of British soldiers suggest that they were hungry, remaining
outside the provisioning trade. A second discrepant theme is connected to British
perceptions of the Illinois Indians. Fears of Indian unrest, of plots, hostility, of the French
stirring up the Indians to attack Fort Chartres are rife in the initial British accounts. But
where exactly were the Indians? The Mechigamea and the Peoria had left the Chartres area
in 1765, following many of the French across the river to Spanish Louisiana. The numbers
of remaining Illinois, either at Kaskaskia or up at Cahokia, were very small. In 1763,
Captain Charles Aubry, reflecting on his sojourn in the Illinois in 1757, wrote that at
Kaskaskia, there were one hundred warriors; near Fort Chartres were about fifty
Mechigamea, and north, up at Cahokia, were “sixty fighting men.”59 Despite these low
numbers, British feared the Illinois kinship and networking systems, especially with tribes to
the north and east. Their recent experiences in the Seven Years War, but more especially,
with Pontiac’s War in 1763, predisposed them to great wariness, although they also
perceived impoverishment and degradation of the Indians.60 That impoverishment, most
consistently blamed on alcohol (French rum and brandy), economic dependency, and radical
shifts in the amount and variety of subsistence activities, is also linked to the decay of the
Chartres trade matrix. Philip Pittman perceived that trade was still thriving in the Illinois,
despite the cessation of the wheat convoys: “In the late wars New Orleans and the lower
59
Numbers from Aubry are given in Joseph Jablow, Indians of Illinois and Indiana: Illinois, Kickapoo, and
Potawatomi Indians (New York: Garland Publishing Inc., 1974), p. 236.
60
For the best recent treatment of British-Indian relations before and during Pontiac’s War, see Gregory Evans
Dowd, War Under Heaven: Pontiac, the Indian Nation, & the British Empire (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2002); see especially pp. 168-173, “The Struggle for Illinois.”
194
parts of Louisiana were supplied with flour...and other provisions from this country; at
present, its commerce is mostly confined to peltry and furs, which are got in traffic from the
Indians....”61 Yet the provisioning trade is not mentioned. The importance of foodstuff
exchange in a frontier environment cannot be overestimated. The French commander over at
Vincennes alluded to the consequences of disappearing Indians in 1752 when he wrote, “But
what most disquiets me is that we have no more Indians at the post, which induces some of
our inhabitants to leave the place as they can only live by trade with the Indians.”62 By
December of 1765, Lieutenant Fraser was writing to General Gage from Fort Chartres, “The
Indians have also left our side, and gone to the Spanish side.…”63 The disintegration of the
Chartres trade matrix across the 1750’s and 1760’s may well have contributed to the French
exodus.
“I am now in great distress for Want of Provisions”64
The first five years of British experience in the Illinois were marked by hunger, illness,
privation, and frictive encounters with disparate groups of Indians. In August of 1765, the
British made the first successful attempt to occupy and command the Illinois Country.
Almost two years earlier, in November of 1763, General Thomas Gage had succeeded
Jeffrey Amherst as commander in chief of the British Army in America. Gage was
convinced that “an early occupation of the western posts was essential.” He believed such
occupations would “interrupt” or “cut off” communications between French and Indians in
61
Philip Pittman, The Present State, p. 97.
St. Ange to Vaudreuil, February, 1752, in Pease, Illinois on the Eve, p. 485.
63
Fraser to Gage, December 16, 1765, in Alvord and Carter, The New Regime, p. 131.
64
Major Farmar of the 34th Regiment of Foot, to British Secretary of War Barrington, March 19, 1766, in
Alvord and Carter, The New Regime, p. 191.
62
195
the wilderness.65 A close study of Gage’s letters over the course of the next few years
reveals an exasperated education as he came to realize the extent and depth of those FrenchIndian communications. Prior to the commissioning of Captain Thomas Stirling and his
Black Watch Regiment company, the British had sent Major Arthur Loftus up from New
Orleans, the Indian agent George Croghan down the Ohio, and Lieutenant Alexander Fraser
also out to Fort Chartres. All three attempts failed, specifically due to Indian conflict. Major
Loftus’ expedition was attacked 240 miles above New Orleans on the Mississippi by “hostile
Indians.” The first descriptions of those Indians identify them as Quapaw and Tunica, but
later, in Loftus’ exculpatory letters to Gage, he details the tribes as “Ofogoula, Choctaw,
Avoyelles, and Tunica,” all strongly French allied.66
In a deposition, Indian chiefs of these
tribes blamed the British for a smallpox epidemic brought into New Orleans: “They have
caused nearly all our children to die.” The Indians said that the French, “…our brothers,
have never given us any disease.” When Major Loftus tried to explain that the British were
not going to claim and settle the Illinois but only to advantage Indian tribes by setting up
trading posts, the Indian chiefs were not deceived. One asked, “Do the lands of the Illinois
belong to them more than others?”67
Arthur Loftus did not attempt to re-ascend the Mississippi.68
When George Croghan
optimistically set out for Fort Chartres, Kickapoo and Mascouten Indians captured him on the
Ohio and came near to burning him at the stake; he managed to talk his way free, with the
65
Clarence Carter, Great Britain and the Illinois Country 1763-1774 (Washington: The American Historical
Association, 1910), p. 31.
66
Loftus to Gage, April 9, 1764, in Clarence Alvord and Clarence Carter, The Critical Period 1763-1765
(Springfield, Illinois: Illinois State Historical Library, 1915), p. 230.
67
See Deposition of Indians in Alvord and Carter, The Critical Period, pp. 235-236.
68
Bradley Gericke, ““To the Distant Illinois Country: The Stirling Expedition to Fort de Chartres, 1765,”
Journal of Illinois History, Vol. 2(2), 1999, p. 89; see also the introduction in Clarence Alvord and Clarence
Carter, eds., The Critical Period, 1763-1765, (Springfield: Illinois State Historical Library, 1915), pp. xvii-lvii.
196
fortuitous (and ironic) intervention of Pontiac.69 Lieutenant Alexander Fraser reached Fort
Chartres but stayed only two weeks, finding himself harassed and threatened by Illinois
Indians in the area.70 When Captain Stirling was commissioned to try a fourth time, the
British, older and wiser, sent him out upon the rivers with a considerable detachment of men.
Lieutenant Eddington’s journal opens with a dramatic scene of embarkation:
Down the Ohio to the Country of the Illinoise moved the Detachment
of the 42 Regt. It consisted of one Captain, three Lieutenants, one
Surgeon, four Sergts., four Corporals, two Drumrs, and ninetytwo
Privates, one Bombadier and four mattroses of the Artillery, two
Indian Interpreters and twelve Indian Warriors of the Six Nations and
the Delawares. They had with them three months provisions, six
thousand cartridges, two kegs of powder, one of ball, another of flints
& c. They set off from Fort Pitt August the 24th 1765 in seven large &
one small Battoe, in order to take possession of the Country of the
Illinoise, situated on the East side of the Mississippi, about five
Hundred Leagues above N. Orleans.71
The party arrived at Fort Chartres on October 9. Both the journals kept by Captain
Thomas Stirling and Eddington record the number of animals shot at, killed for food and
sport, or “dispatched” along the Ohio and the Mississippi. Often multiple numbers of
animals are noted, such as Eddington’s remark that, while descending the Mississippi on the
return trip, Chickasaw hunters saw no Buffalo but “killed 5 or 6 large Bears.”72 Stirling
himself had a narrow escape with a black bear (“He was a monstrous creature. I had him
69
See Croghan’s own account of this capture and release in “Croghan’s Journal,” June 8, 1765, in Alvord and
Carter, The New Regime, p. 30-31. Croghan identifies the Indian attackers as “Kickapers and Musquatimes.”
Alvord and Carter’s footnote may erroneously identify the “Musquatimes” as Foxes (Mesquatchie); it is more
likely, that far south to the Ohio River, that they were Mascoutens.
70
Fraser’s “treatment” by the Illinois Indians is variously described. George Croghan mentions “an Account of
the bad reception & ill treatment M. Frazier & M. Sinnott met with on their Arrival there.” See Croghan’s
journal entry for June 15, 1765, in The New Regime, p. 40. Captain Harry Gordon writing to William Johnson
on August 10 of the same year is more specific: “…we had the accounts of Lieut. Fraser being taken out of the
Commandants House at Fort Chartres by the Indians and delivered to Pondiac. His party was sent down the
Mississippi.…” See Gordon to Johnson, August 10, 1765, in The New Regime, p. 67.
71
“Journal Kept by Lt. Eddington or the Surgeon,” in Broadswords & Bayonets, pp. 48-49.
72
“Journal,” p. 97.
197
skinned. He measured above 6 feet long.”73) Other entries mention female bears with cubs;
white-tailed deer, buffalo crossing rivers singly or in herds; and multitudes of birds. Some of
Stirling’s men were apparently encountering pelicans for the first time, for Eddington
describes them, writing of “an innumerable quantity of large white fowls. We shot some of
them.…” He precisely observed and recorded features of the birds, saying that upon picking
one up, they “found it to be a Species of Pelican. The plumage is entirely white, only the Tips
of the Wings excepted, which are jett black.” In nearly medical terms he mentions the
pouch, “ a skinny, membranous substance.…”74 Stirling recounts that upon first catching
sight of the pelicans in the evening along the Ohio, “we perceived what at first many of the
men said was a regt. of french drawn up on the Beach. I confess, it was very like it, as they
were all white except the principal feathers of the wings, which were grey, & our
sharpsighted soldiers did not know what to make of them.”75
Mistaking pelicans for French soldiers is an indication of the anticipatory mindset of these
British soldiers: fresh from the Seven Years War, dispatched to a farflung outpost wholly
settled and commanded by French, British foot soldiers and artillery alike may have expected
to find French troops arrayed in full uniform.76 The reality of life in French Illinois – the
abandonment of farms, the cessation of grain convoys, the draining away of manpower and
Indians over the course of the war, and the subsequent reduction in grain production all
played a role in depleting the settlements. As they embarked for the Illinois, the British did
not focus on the material state of the colony but on its capacity for loyalty, on the tenor of the
73
“Journal of Captain Thomas Stirling,” in Broadswords & Bayonets, p. 37.
“Journal Kept by Lt. Eddington,” p. 67.
75
“Journal of Captain Thomas Stirling,” p. 37.
76
See the excellent overview of the military operations of the Black Watch Regiment in Gericke, “To the
Distant Illinois Country.” The Black Watch “participated in the assault on Fort Ticonderoga in 1758 and was
present at the capture of Montreal in 1760.” The Black Watch also fought in Pontiac’s War in 1764. See
Gericke, p. 91.
74
198
Indian temperament, and on the smoothness of the political-military transition. In their
introduction to The New Regime 1765-1767, Alvord and Carter note that “the large supply of
provisions which the colony had produced in former years seems to have decreased; at any
rate it fell short of the expectations of the officers.”77 On the journey down the Ohio and up
the Mississippi, the soldiers were prepared for French “resistance” and Indian ambush.
Stirling devised meticulous plans for night watches and the formation of attack lines should
the convoy be fired on while in midstream: “…the men to jump ashore, form in one file at 2
yards from each other, cover themselves under the bank or the nearest tree till the whole was
landed. Then the Enemy to be vigorously pushed with bayonets.”78
Such precautions were wise, given the failed history of British penetration into the newlyceded French lands and the “difficulties” encountered with various Indian nations all along
the rivers. The possibility of violence is the consistent theme in British correspondence.
Despite the fact that the attempts to reach Fort Chartres all involved conflict with different
groups of Indians – as diverse as the lower Mississippi tribes like the Ofogoula and the
Tunica or the Peoria up in Illinois – British writers often lumped Indians in broad categories
geographically. Indians frequently emerge in correspondence as a single adversarial
population to be watched, cajoled, bought off, and fought. General Gage wrote in 1765 that
“…our Differences with the Western Indians begin to subside very fast.”79 A few weeks
earlier, however, he names specific tribes and organizes them along a spectrum of hostility:
“The Indians in General find Belief, as fast as the French can invent storys, but the
77
Alvord and Carter, The New Regime, p. xii.
“The Journal of Captain Stirling,” in Broadswords & Bayonets, p. 28. For British frontier military strategies,
one that reassesses the long held view that British soldiers were ill-suited to wilderness combat, often taken
unawares by agile Indians and frontiersmen, see Peter E. Russell, “Redcoats in the Wilderness: the British
Officer and Irregular Warfare in Europe and America, 1740-1760,” The William & Mary Quarterly, 3rd. Ser.
Vol. 35, No. 4, October 1978, p 629-652..
79
Gage to Conway, September 23, 1765, in Alvord and Carter, The New Regime, p. 85.
78
199
Pouteatamies [Potawatomi] of St. Joseph, and a Tribe of Chippewas of Saguinam, appear the
most forward and ready to commit Hostilities.”80
Historians agree that the British “…suffered from a general lack of credible firsthand
information about the land and people of the Illinois country.”81 In the absence of any real
history detailing the near century of interaction between the French and Indians, the British
usually interpreted Indian loyalty to the French as a result of either French machinations or of
French cultural degradation. They did not often credit the ancient alliances between the
French and the Indians, concretely formalized in ritual and artifact. Without focusing on
early French sovereignty, General Gage brought himself to acknowledge the superiority of
French trade as a product of years of interaction: “…of all the Systems of Indian Commerce
which have ever come within my Knowledge, I have found none equal to that adopted by the
French; which a long Experience proved to be a good one.”82
In some cases, that “long Experience” was based on specific agreements with western
tribes. In 1760-61, as his regiment retreated south to the Illinois Country after the British had
taken Fort Detroit, the French commander Captain La Chapelle was shown a skin inscribed
with the signature of La Salle. It was a hard, frozen December as La Chapelle’s militia unit
made its weary way “with shoes and uniforms in a very bad state” past St. Joseph and down
the Illinois River. Unexpectedly, they were aided “by the Indians of the region” (likely the
Peoria). The Indian chief brought out a skin roll still bearing La Salle’s seal of wax, although
the imprint had worn off. “We, Cavalier de Salle, representing his Majesty, the King of
France, declare in his name a fair and perpetual alliance with the Nation of the Illinois.
80
Gage to Halifax, August 10, 1765, in The New Regime, p. 69.
Bradley Gericke, “To the Distant Illinois,” p. 81.
82
General Gage to Lord Shelburne, February 22, 1767, cited in Mereness, Travels in the American Colonies, p.
484.
81
200
Cavalier de la Salle.” La Salle had visited the Peoria on the Illinois about 1689. On the
strength of this seventy year old skin document, the Indians of the Illinois furnished the
French snowshoes, sledges, ten dogs, and fifty Indian guides to see them to Fort Chartres.83
Yet British letter writers and diarists during the British occupation of Illinois speak almost
uniformly of French wiles, of present-day intrigues in which Indians were “influenced.”
Lieutenant Eddington, for instance, writes as if it were a certainty that the French in New
Orleans were “spirit[ing] up the Savages against us” out of fear that when the British took
over Fort Chartres, they would “in time beat them out of the Indian Trade.”84 The invisible,
seditious, and mysterious ways of the French out in the wilderness, mingling with Indians in
their villages, speaking their languages, calling on a long shared trade history – such ways
seemed an ubiquitous and formidable threat. In 1767 William Johnson wrote to General
Gage about an incident in West Florida: “The French were doubtless at the bottom of the
Affair in West Florida, as they are of all other disturbances on the Continent.”85
Despite these concerns, in none of the letters exchanged among British officials prior to
Stirling’s expedition is there a mention of potential problems of supply, of the decay of the
provisioning trade, or of food shortages. It is a striking omission in the flurry of letters.86
The immense distance of the French settlements from the supply warehouses in Philadelphia
– the firm of Baynton, Morgan, and Wharton – is mentioned obliquely, almost as a curiosity.
83
Louise Kellogg, “La Chapelle’s Remarkable Retreat through the Mississippi Valley, 1760-61,” Mississippi
Valley Historical Review, Vol. 22 (1), June, 1935, pp. 63-81.
84
“Journal of Lt. Eddington,” in Broadswords & Bayonets, p. 102.
85
Johnson to Gage, January 15, 1767, in The New Regime, p. 483.
86
See, for instance, the letters between Lieutenant Fraser and George Croghan, or those between General
Thomas Gage and Sir William Johnson, 1765-1767, in Alvord and Carter, The New Regime, 1765-1767, (1916).
Croghan is focused on fur trade profits and the possibilities of securing peace with the western Indians to
promote that trade; Gage writes of nefarious activities of the French in stirring up trouble with the Indians
against the British (a recurrent and vehement theme in Gage’s letters particularly); he also discusses the effect
of Pontiac’s War and new trade regulations. It isn’t until the actual possession of Fort Chartres by Captain
Stirling that letters explicitly about provisions, stores, and supplies begin to appear. The urgent tone of many of
these letters suggests the occupying British were surprised and dismayed to find a depleted country.
201
In 1770, General Haldimand wrote to General Gage, “What a strange Project is this of
settling a new country by passing over such a number of leagues of land, as yet uncultivated,
from the present inhabited frontier to the Mississippi!”87 Exactly how the incoming British
soldiers viewed the French settlements in 1763 is an interesting question. At least one
scholar believes the soldiers expected to find an empty country with a few “tenuous hamlets
clinging precariously to the edge of known civilization.”88 Had this been the case, it is likely
Stirling’s expedition might have taken more provisions. They carried but a three months’
supply of pork, beef, and flour.89 There is also the general British view of the French in
North America, both the French Canadians and the Illinoisians. In some ways, the British
administering the vast northwest interior came to conflate perceptions of the wilderness with
its occupants.90 One historian writes that the British officials “almost immediately came to
despise and distrust the still numerous French Canadians still living at Detroit, Vincennes,
Fort Chartres, Michilimackinac, Green Bay….”91 British correspondence is full of
characterizations of the interior French; they are lazy, licentious, “Indianized” and
“vagabond.” General Gage emerges as one of the most passionate attackers. According to
Gage, out in the “wilderness” the French “lived a lazy kind of Indian life…almost as wild as
the Savages themselves.…”92 He felt the French were “as near as wild as the Country they
87
Haldimand to Gage, May 16, 1770, in Thomas Gage Papers, British Museum Additional Mss., 21664:148 and
21665:289, photostats in the Illinois Historical Survey.
88
Bradley T. Gericke, “To the Distant Illinois,” p. 82.
89
“Journal of Captain Thomas Stirling,” in Broadswords and Bayonets, p. 26; see also the discussion of
provisions in Gericke, pp. 91-92.
90
For the best treatment of the British and the concept of “wilderness” as a distinct geopolitical and geospatial
concept creating its own set of policies, see Jack M. Sosin, Whitehall and the Wilderness: the Middle West in
British colonial policy, 1760 –1775 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961).
91
See Kerry A Trask, “To Cast Out the Devils: British Ideology and the French Canadians of the Northwest
Interior, 1760 – 1774,” American Review of Canadian Studies, XV (3), 1985, p. 249. Kerry demonstrates the
power of an entrenched ideology in shaping a national policy.
92
Thomas Gage to Jeffrey Amherst, Match 26, 1762, cited in Trask, “To Cast Out the Devils,” p. 254.
202
go in, or the People they deal with, and by far more vicious and wicked.”93 The Indian trader
and sometimes agent George Croghan expressed contempt for the French living at Detroit,
writing in his journal that they were a “…lazy idle people, depending chiefly on the savages
for subsistence…whose customs and manners they have wholly adopted.”94 Given these
beliefs, particularly about the level of French industry and agriculture, it is puzzling why the
British attempting to occupy French Illinois did not advance upon the rivers realistically
prepared to exist in a far-flung country without a strong supply system.
Yet food was certainly on the minds of the men in Stirling’s expedition. On the way down
the Ohio and up the Mississippi, Stirling and Eddington both discuss the plenitude – or
absence – of game. While Eddington uses the phrase “abounds with” consistently to
describe a wide variety of game, fish, and birds, conspicuous among both accounts is the
focus on buffalo. In early September, 26 days from Pittsburgh on the Ohio River, Stirling
notes how “shy” the buffalo are on the shores, how Indian hunters’ “frequent attempts to fire
on them” was causing some delay. He speculates that the buffalo have become shy due to
the “Shawnese “[Shawnee Indians] “continually hunting them thereabouts.”95 On October
first, having entered the mouth of the Mississippi, he complains again about the elusiveness
of buffalo. “We saw a great many Buffaloe Tracks. However, as the French are continually
hunting from the Mouth of the Ohio upwards, they are very shy….”96 Attempts to explain
buffalo scarcity involved pointing a finger at Indian and French hunters. British observers did
not evidently think in terms of buffalo migrations.
93
Thomas Gage to Lord Shelburne, February 22, 1767, cited in Mereness, Travels in the American Colonies, p.
462.
94
“Journal of George Croghan,” cited in Michigan Pioneer & Historical Collections, Volume 3, p. 14.
95
“Journal of Captain Thomas Stirling,” in Broadswords & Bayonets, p. 60.
96
Ibid., p. 76.
203
Interviews with late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century pioneers of Illinois,
Anglo-Americans who settled the upcountry above the French prior to 1813, reveal a specific
buffalo migration pattern. “On account of the green-headed flies the buffalo would leave the
Wabash Country and range west and north of the Illinois River during the summer
months.”97 The migration of Illinois buffalo seems to have been a result of many factors,
including heat, insects, movement to escape snow, movement toward better forage, and
proximity to water.98 As early as 1680, Louis Hennepin was describing the “movement” of
“wild cattle or bulls,” saying that they “change country according to the seasons.” Hennepin
apparently was implying that migration functioned as an adaptive insurance against
extirpation by humans.99 The movement of buffalo helps to explain contradictions in
historical accounts: some observers claim “the prairie westward for miles in extent was
frequently blackened.”100 Marquette and Joliet used precise numbers to describe early bison
herds in 1673: 400-500 animals.101 However, another French missionary, Sebastien Rasle,
wrote of bison along the Illinois River in 1690 as being of “countless numbers.” He estimated
4,000 to 5,000 animals on the prairies, “as far as the eye can reach.”102 Estimates are often
contradictory. Careful accounts of Illinois bison pinpoint small, enumerated herds. Other
descriptions refer to herds blackening the land until the earth looked like “one black robe.”103
Such vivid, blanketing images have much greater resonance in the buffalo biology and
culture of the nineteenth century Great Plains. There, the Trans-Mississippi West bison
97
Nehemiah Matson, Pioneers of Illinois, p. 145.
J. Dewey Soper, “History, range, and home life of the northern bison,” Ecological Monographs 11, 1941, p.
384.
99
John White, A Review of the American Bison in Illinois, with an Emphasis on Historical Accounts (Urbana,
Illinois: The Nature Conservancy, 1996), p. 14.
100
Nehemiah Matson, Pioneers of Illinois, p. 145.
101
Counts by Marquette and Joliet given in White, A Review, p. 8.
102
Sebastien Rasle cited in White, A Review, p. 9.
103
This famous phrase appears in many articles and accounts of buffalo on both sides of the Mississippi. A
recent example is in the 1997-1998 Marysville, Kansas, Tourism Guide, p. 34.
98
204
herds multiplied to extraordinary numbers. One nineteenth century biologist studying
buffalo concluded that while the numbers of Illinois animals may have seemed “considerable
to dwellers east of the Mississippi,” in reality they were “mere stragglers from the
innumerable mass” out on the western Great Plains.104
From the early decades of French settlement, buffalo were more plentiful north of the
Mississippi bottomlands. They are described as being “commonly seen along the Illinois
River…and very scarce along the lower Mississippi River in Illinois.” Some historians credit
this disparity to French hunting of buffalo.105 Although Father Vivier in the 1750’s wrote
that bison “abound everywhere,” and although Lieutenant Alexander Fraser in 1766 also
observed “vast Numbers of Buffaloe,” by the late 1760’s, there was a noted scarcity of
animals along the Mississippi River in southern Illinois.106 By the time of the British
occupation, the location of the “vast” buffalo herds seems to have shifted. Observers were
describing, in the area of the Wabash River across the Grand Prairie, “vast numbers of
Buffaloe & Deer And every other species of Game common in that country.” Lieutenant
Fraser wrote of “extraordinary large and frequent herds” near the confluence of the Ohio and
the Wabash.107 Comparative perceptions are important in accounting for observers’ beliefs
that the herds were “vast.” Almost all European accounts as well as Anglo-Americans’ from
the Illinois Country use the language of enormity and inexhaustible abundance to describe
104
See the comprehensive discussion of buffalo on the eastern and western plains by Frank Gilbert Roe, The
North American Buffalo: A Critical Study of the Species in its Wild State, Second Edition (Toronto: University
of Toronto Press, 1970). Roe cites William Hornaday on buffalo numbers, p. 256. For the most recent and
convincing ecological analysis of the disappearance of the Great Plains buffalo, see Andrew C. Isenberg, The
Destruction of the Bison: an Environmental History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Isenberg
argues for a matrix of factors arising from both cultural and ecological encounters between Great Plains Indians
and Europeans. I am indebted to Dr. David Stradling for emphasizing to me the importance of Isenberg’s work.
105
For instance, see John White’s conclusions in A Review, p. 10.
106
Vivier and Fraser cited in White, A Review, p. 11.
107
Alexander Fraser, cited in White, p. 11.
205
wildlife.108 Their prior experiences should be taken into account. For instance, Father
Sebastien Rasle, who described buffalo herds of “four and five thousand” along the Illinois
River, was also ministering to the Abenaki Indians in the northern New England area, in
what is now Maine. In a 1723 letter to his brother, Rasle describes a northern land stripped
of game: “…for ten years they have no longer either elks or deer. Bears and beavers have
become very scarce. They seldom have any food but Indian corn, beans and squashes.”109 It
is in this same letter that he recalls the buffalo herds he saw in 1690 along the Illinois. After
the environment of northern New England, beginning to be scoured of game and fur-bearing
mammals through at least seventy years of French and Indian hunting, Father Rasle may
have felt the Illinois Country to have been almost preternaturally abundant.
Differing accounts of buffalo in Illinois may reflect the likelihood that buffalo moved to
different locations seasonally. Research on biting flies, Tabanidae, strongly supports this.
Deer and horse flies, including some species of the “green headed flies” mentioned by early
pioneers, inflict torment and genuine wounds on buffalo. Grazing herds whose tails move in
switching unison often reveal palm-size patches of bloody, hairless flesh, to which
Tabanidae are drawn not only for bloodmeals but to deposit larvae. In this sense Tabanidae
may be understood not just as a pest but as a form of seasonal predator. Many species lay
eggs right on the edges of trail vegetation, constructing a larval ambush. The flies have
evolved particularly to prey on large herbivores; they are drawn to contrasts in color,
especially large dark shapes against a lighter background of green, and also to exhaled
108
For the best initial discussion of perceptions of inexhaustible abundance in the New World, see William
Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and
Wang, 1983), especially chapter 3, “Seasons of Want and Plenty,” pp. 34-53.
109
Father Sebastien Rale [Rasle] to his brother, October 12, 1723, letter printed in Edna Kenton, The Indians of
North America,Volume Two (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & Company, 1927), p. 384.
206
carbon dioxide.110 In 1816 the surveyor Henry Allyn, working along the Illinois River and
east to the Grand Prairie, described an attack by a “large green fly” on his horses. He felt this
insect was “numerous as the locusts of Egypt & as voracious...their bite was severe: in less
than a second after lighting, the blood would fly, & run down their sides in streams.” Allyn
saw that after his party entered upon the prairie, “the flies rose from the grass in myriads, &
formed a perfect cloud around our horses, which began to pitch, rear, & snort.”111
In addition to the famous wallowing, in which buffalo coated themselves with mud to
create a dried, protective earthen husk, buffalo in Illinois used migration. Tabanidae also
commonly lay their eggs in watery places, often on the edges of streams, bogs, and
marshes.112 The hatching flies tend to stay out of large open areas because of wind.113
Buffalo migrated to areas that were freer of bogs and marshes, standing water, and sloughs,
and to places that were more open and windy. In addition, buffalo, as grazing herbivores,
were strongly attracted to recently-burned areas because of more tender and nutritious fresh
growth.114
Now, as during the eighteenth century, buffalo most favor “grama, buffalo,
wheat, blue, blue-joint, June, dropseed, and windmill” grasses, most of which are native to
110
L.L. Pechuman, Donald W. Webb, and H.J. Taskey, The Diptera or True Flies of Illinois I. Tabanidae,
Illinois Natural History Bulletin Volume 33, Article 1 (Champaign, Illinois: State of Illinois Department of
Energy and Natural Resources, 1983), p. 11.
111
H. Allyn and J.A. Smeltzer, Henry Allyn, Autobiography (Portland, Oregon: Jean Allyn Smeltzer, 1974),
cited in John White, Early Accounts of the Ecology of the Big Rivers Area (Springfield, Illinois: Illinois
Department of Natural Resources, 2000), p. 67.
112
See John Burger, “Yellowstone’s Insect Vampires,” Yellowstone Science, Vol. 4, Number 4, p. 14. This
article corroborates the movement of buffalo to escape biting flies in Yellowstone National Park. See also P.D.
Taylor and S.M. Smith, “Activities and physiological states of male and female Tabanus sackeni,” Medical
Veterinary Entomology, 3, 1989, pp. 203-212.
113
L.L. Pechuman et al, “The Diptera,” p. 11.
114
Forrest Rose, “Ring in the Old: Study of tree rings brings perspective to human life,” Focus 21, Spring,
1999, p. 15, for discussion about the setting of fires by Native Americans and pioneers to foster growth for
forage. See also Said A. Damhoureyeh and David C. Hartnett, “Effects of Bison and Cattle on Growth,
Reproduction, and Abundance of Five Tallgrass Prairie Forbs,” American Journal of Botany 84 (12), 1997,
1719-1728.
207
the Illinois tallgrass prairies.115 Much of the evidence for aboriginal burning of prairies in
Illinois is taken from central and northern prairies. The clustering of buffalo herds in the
northern half of the Illinois Country, especially between the Illinois and the Wabash, can thus
perhaps be understood as a specific migratory response to avoid Tabanidae and perhaps find
a greener, sweeter graze. The early nineteenth-century observer James Hall wrote of the
buffalo “tracts” or traces across the Grand Prairie of Illinois that the animals moved to higher
ground to escape “prairie flies” in summer. In winter, they sought the margins of “large
rivers,” where they could browse on giant cane, Arundinaria gigantica, an evergreen.116
Early accounts of Anglo-Americans settling along the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers stress that
in winter, they turned their stock into the tangled stands of cane, often the only forage the
animals had over the cold months. Some of this “cane” may actually have been stout
scrubbing rush, Equisetum hyemale robustum. In 1803 Lewis and Clark noted scrubbing
rush while ascending the Mississippi above the Ohio, where “the banks appear to abound
with the sand or scrubbing rush, it grows much thicker, and arises to a much greater height in
the bottoms of this river than I ever observed it elsewhere.” William Clark felt the rush was
“agreeable food for both cattle and horses.”117 Buffalo would also browse on Equisetum and
would move towards the rivers to find it. Andrew Isenberg points out that on the Great
Plains, buffalo migration was both complex (a biological-reproductive behavior) and
unpredictable; he describes this phenomenon as “the fluidity of bison aggregation,”
connecting it to migratory and hunting patterns of Indians who became nomadic in pursuit of
115
Tom McHugh, The Time of the Buffalo (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972), p. 150.
James Hall, Notes on the Western States, Containing Descriptive Sketches of their Soil, Climate, Resources,
and Scenery (Philadelphia: Harrison Hall, 1838), pp. 110-111.
117
The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition August 30, 1803 – August 24, 1804 (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1986), p. 102.
116
208
herds. Judging from contradictory historical accounts in the Illinois Country, the migration of
Illinois buffalo may also have been as erratic.118
The relevance of buffalo migratory patterns to the history of the Illinois Country in the
1760’s lies in the British difficulties in procuring food; this in turn stems from the
disintegration of the provisioning trade at Fort Chartres. British attempted to understand the
scarcity of buffalo by accusing French hunters of profligate slaughter. In 1769 a British
officer described the French as “destroy[ing] immense Number of Buffaloes.”119 French
hunting parties were ranging south towards the Kentucky lands, pursuing the herds who often
sought the salt deposits in those areas.120 These hunting forays supplied the lucrative New
Orleans buffalo market. British officials perceived that the French were hunting “as
regularly as the Savages.”121 Another officer at Fort Chartres wrote at the same time that
fourteen Chickasaw Indians “were of great Service in Hunting; & Had it not been for the
Buffaloe Meat, they & some others Hunters supplied us with, the Expedition must have
failed, being about five Weeks short of provisions.”122 The procuring and selling rhythms of
the original trade matrix at the fort had been meshed into Indian summer and winter hunts
and, in the case of black bear, into patterns of animal hibernation as well. French and Indians
alike used domestic animals to supplement seasonal hunts. The depletion of human beings
from the French settlements, prior to and during the British occupation, reconfigured hunting
to some extent. The lapsing of agriculture was also a piece of this reconfiguration. In 1768,
118
Andrew C. Isenberg, The Destruction of the Bison, p. 66 – 68.
Cited in White, A Review, p. 12.
120
See John A. Jakle, “The American Bison and the Human Occupance of the Ohio Valley,” Proceedings of the
American Philosophical Society, Vol. 112 (4), August, 1968, especially Fig. 1, p. 300. Jakle identifies salt licks
on either side of the Ohio River and probable buffalo traces connecting these sites. Jakle also asserts that “the
woodland bison developed a compelling appetite for salt which stimulated seasonal movement from the valley’s
Prairie feeding grounds to the salt licks” (see p. 302).
121
Stirling to Gage, December 15, 1765, in Alvord and Carter, The New Regime, p. 125.
122
Farmar to Stuart, December 16, 1765, in Alvord and Carter, The New Regime, p, 128.
119
209
Father Meurin, returning voluntarily to the Illinois after the Jesuit Order had been expelled,
wrote that he was ministering to twenty people at Prairie du Rocher and “four men at St.
Philip.…”123 This was probably not enough of an agricultural work force to put in a healthy
wheat crop.
The effect of uncertain meat supplies caused British officials to hire hunters who would
travel long distances on horseback to locate buffalo herds. The British used Indians and
occasionally, French inhabitants, but they also began to send out commissioned hunters from
the fort’s supply firm. In addition, French inhabitants found they could sell foodstuffs to the
hungry soldiers at “very dear” prices. General Gage wrote to the British commander at Fort
Chartres in 1767, “The provision purchased at the Illinois is excessive dear.…” He compares
the food prices with those in the Fort Pitt area: “It comes much heavier at the Illinois, at the
rate you purchase it from the Inhabitants.”124 British soldiers may have been procuring their
own food as well. Latrine pit excavations dating from the British occupation of Fort Chartres
(renamed Fort Cavendish) reveal large numbers of domestic animal bones as well as redeared turtle carapaces (“sliders”).125 The number of these turtle shells coinciding with the
British at Fort Chartres suggests that soldiers were privately setting turtle traps in the river; it
wouldn’t have been difficult, since the Mississippi was washing up around the western wall.
In the fall of 1768 a British letter-writer from Fort Chartres mentioned that “the Turtle is
commonly of 30 lb. Weight…they are Reckoned to be near as good as those taken at sea for
soup.”126 This pattern likely developed as a result of a severe food shortage shortly after the
123
John Rothensteiner, History of the Archdiocese of St. Louis in the Various Stages of Development from A.D.
1673 to A.D. 1928 Volume I (St. Louis: Catholic Historical Society, 1923), p. 126.
124
Gage to Reed, July 15, 1767, in Alvord and Carter, The New Regime, pp. 584-585.
125
Edward B. Jelks, Carl J. Ekberg, and Terrance C. Martin, Excavations at the Laurens Site: probable location
of Fort de Chartres I (Springfield: Illinois Historic Preservation Agency, 1989), p. 10.
126
Butricke to Barnsley, September 15, 1768, in Clarence Alvord and Clarence Carter, Trade and Politics 17671769 (Springfield, Illinois: Illinois State Historical Library, 1921), p. 409.
210
British occupation. The second British officer to command at the fort, Major Farmar, wrote
to Secretary of War Barrington in March of 1766, “I am now in great distress for Want of
Provisions especially for Flour. I don’t know how I shall be able to keep Possession of the
Garrison until a Supply arrives. The Soldiers are frequently three or four days without
anything but Bread and Indian Corn; as the Country cannot afford sufficient Meat for the
daily Consumption of the Troops.”127 This country that could not “afford sufficient meat”
had been described only five months before by Lieutenant Eddington as “abound[ing] with
incredible quantities of all kinds of Game. Particularly Buffalowes, Elks, Deer of various
kinds, Bears, Oppossums, Raccoons, which are very common…Turkies are
everywhere.…”128 The months between the arrival of Stirling’s expedition and the rather
frantic letters of Major Farmar in the spring contain a history of British, French, and Indian
interaction that suggests the Chartres trade matrix had dissolved. It also suggests that the
British soldiers, perhaps those especially of Captain Stirling’s Black Watch, were not trained
as hunters.
The leaving of Illinois Indian tribes from the vicinity of the fort has not been credited
historically as a factor in the difficulty of British experience in the Illinois Country. These
Indians, most especially the Mechigamea, were middlemen in a fluid, evolved, food
procurement system. While food exchange also drew in French hunters, it depended on the
very large meat hauls obtained by Indians on their winter and summer hunts. One factor
enabling Indians to return to the Chartres area with heavy packs of smoked tenderloins,
haunches, buffalo tongues, rendered fat, and hides was the presence of women on the hunts.
Early observers of the Miami tribe, for instance, mention how critical the women were to the
127
128
Farmar to Barrington, March 19, 1766, in Alvord and Carter, The New Regime, p. 191.
“Journal of Lt. Eddington,” in Broadswords & Bayonets, pp. 93-94.
211
seasonal hunts, how they were able to pack exceptionally heavy loads of meat on their backs
and to run with these loads for long distances. The Illinois Indian villages decamped en
masse to the prairies for the hunts, and all individuals were employed in the production of the
salted, smoked buffalo and other game.129 With the radical reduction in Indian village
population – most tragically for the Mechigamea and Cahokia in 1752, when as many as 90
men, women, and children were killed in the Fox raid – the nature of seasonal hunts must
have changed. Late in 1765, Major Farmar wrote to Gage suggesting that the “great
Numbers” of Indians assembling at Fort Chartres in February, March, April, and May had
been used to being supplied by the French “with double what we allow the Soldiers…and
also Meat.” Farmar stresses that the supply of “meat” going to Indians “entirely depends
upon the Success the Hunters have in killing Buffalo, which is the Principal Maintenance of
this Country.”130 From this letter it seems clear that Indian groups living near the fort and
perhaps at some distance from it were obtaining food supplies and were no longer the
suppliers themselves.
However, the hunts were still in evidence in 1768 among the Peoria to the north, for the
Fort Chartres Commissary for the firm of Baynton, Wharton, and Morgan recorded that
“Black Dog, a Chief of the Piorias” had appeared at the fort twice, once in winter and once in
spring. In the winter, Black Dog revealed that his people had just returned from the winter
hunt. In the spring, “a great part of his Nation” were “going out on their summe[r] Hunt on
the Grand Prairies to Provide Meat for their Old Men.”131 There is no mention that the
129
James Scott, A history of the Illinois Nation of Indians from their discovery to the present day (Notes from
Meetings, Streator Historical Society, 1973), p. 10 – 11. Manuscript in the Ayer Collection, Newberry Library,
Chicago, Illinois.
130
Farmar to Gage, December 16-19, 1765, in Alvord and Carter, The New Regime, p. 133.
131
Account of Commissary Edward Cole and Captain Gordon Forbes, cited in Jablow, Indians of Illinois and
Indiana, p. 263.
212
Peoria were routinely supplying Fort Chartres. Of additional interest here is the location of
the summer hunt: on the Grand Prairie of northern Illinois, where the habitual migratory
movement of buffalo left hard, rutted paths so broad two carriages could travel abreast.
During the tenure of Colonel Reed at Fort Chartres in 1767, he fined a French woman in
Kaskaskia 250 livres for trading a pint of rum to “an Indian” for a “piece of Meat.” She had
“been without any for several days before.”132 Such incidents suggest that Indians were
continuing to trade foodstuffs with the French, and that the French themselves may have
been experiencing food shortages. In letters during these initial years, British observers often
mention small groups of Illinois Indians “coming to the fort to Trade” and to receive
presents, but the details of what they brought to trade are missing. Although the Philadelphia
firm of Baynton, Morgan, and Wharton began to supply Fort Chartres by the end of 1766, the
difficulty in procuring meat continued. French hunters were in competition with the hunters
sent out by the firm. These French hunters (not all from the Illinois settlements) were
sending salted and smoked buffalo tongues and tenderloins down to New Orleans, engaged in
a high-profit convoy trade that offered them the same geographical market as their grain
shipments earlier in the century. There is little evidence they were selling meat to the British
at the fort. The British company hunters preferred to camp near the Ohio and the Wabash
while the French tended to stay farther west and south into the Kentucky lands. The
132
George Morgan to Baynton and Wharton, December 10, 1767, George Morgan Letter Book, in Alvord and
Carter, The New Regime, p. 130. The fine imposed was in reference to the trading or selling of alcohol to an
Indian. In 1765, the British issued a set of “Orders for the Regulation of Trade” from their headquarters in New
York. These general regulations were to apply to all trade. Traders bringing “spiritous liquors” to a fort or post
were to store them, labeled, in the forts until the transactions were completed. No liquors were to be sold to
Indians in or near posts or forts, but after the completion of trade, traders could carry the liquor “two leagues
away” and deliver it to Indians. It is not clear from George Morgan’s letter where the trading of the pint of rum
for the meat took place. See “Orders for the Regulation of Trade,” January 16, 1765, in Alvord and Carter, The
Critical Period, p. 400.
213
commissary George Morgan at the fort was responsible for organizing his firm’s hunters.
Morgan’s letters refer to this part of his duties as “Our Buffalo Adventure.”
This adventure most seriously impacted buffalo in southern Illinois. On one highly
successful hunt during the late summer and early fall of 1767, the company’s hunters along
the Ohio River “…killed upwards of seven hundred Buffalo.” Morgan notes that at the same
time, there were “twenty large Perriogues employed in the same Trade on the Ohio from
New Orleans.”133 Those pirogues contained French hunters. It is not hard to visualize the
scene: British hunters skinning, butchering and rendering the “tallow” from a massive
buffalo kill spread out on the open prairies of the Ohio River banks, leaving the earth
saturated with blood, carcasses and entrails. Out on the Ohio, at least twenty large boats fully
manned with French hunters rowed past like circling vultures. Overhead would have drifted
real vultures, and hidden in the underbrush and timber margin additional consumers would
have lain in wait: the carnivorous predators – most especially the then-populous wolves –
and carrion eaters of the natural world. Thickets trembled with patient ravens, while small
mammals, many concealed in the earth itself, sniffed an air so redolent with fresh blood the
smell would have carried for miles.134
While these birds and animals were rich benefactors of southern Illinois buffalo hunts in
the late 1760’s, one historian has described the British and French attack on southern-ranging
133
Morgan’s correspondence cited in Jablow, Indians of Illinois and Indiana, p. 260-261.
For a contrasting view of the economy and skill of the Great Plains Indians in butchering buffalo, especially
the complete use made of the animal, see “Indians as Consumers,” in Tom McHugh, The Time of the Buffalo, p.
83-109. White hunters typically left much more of the animal. Eventually, the attraction of wolves to the
halfway-butchered carcasses (“the stench of rotting buffalo”) began to be a problem for Anglo-American
settlers; the wolves then also attacked domestic stock. See Stephen Aron, “Pigs and Hunters: “Rights in the
Woods” on the Trans-Appalachian Frontier,” in Contact Points: Amerian Frontiers from the Mohawk Valley to
the Mississippi, 1750 –1830, edited by Andrew R.L. Cayton and Fredrika J. Teute (Chapel Hill: The
University of North Carolina Press, 1998), p. 197.
134
214
bison (migrating south as winter approached) as a “virtual pincers movement.”135 This
hunting competition hastened the extirpation of buffalo from Illinois. Over time, the firm of
Baynton, Morgan and Wharton invested “30,000 pounds in the enterprise [supplying the
Illinois], employing over 300 boatmen.”136 Yet the British still perceived that the French
were “thinning” the herds. George Morgan, complaining to his employers Baynton and
Wharton in 1767, wrote that “the great Number of French Hunters that are procuring Meat up
the Ohio for New Orleans…have so thinn’d the Buffalo....” Morgan felt that if measures
were not taken to stop the hunting, “it will in a short Time be difficult to supply even Fort
Chartres with Meat from thence.” To safeguard their scouting on the Ohio River through
pro-British Cherokee territory, French hunters were even using a ruse of “wear[ing] English
Colours ....”137 Of some significance is the date of this letter – written in winter, when
buffalo herds would likely have been ranging to the south. However, only a year later,
another British observer journeying down the Ohio toward the Illinois Country described the
presence of buffalo herds up to 100 animals: “We killed so many Buffalos that We
commonly served out one a day to Each Company, & they Commonly Weigh’d from 4 to
600 lbs.”138
The continual competition between British and French hunters in the Ohio Valley and the
Illinois provided a counterpoint to another kind of interaction: the competition for Indian
loyalty. On the morning of October 10, 1765, the detachment of the Black Watch Regiment
under Captain Stirling assembled formally to relieve the French officers at the gate of Fort
135
Joseph Jablow, Indians of Illinois and Indiana, p. 261.
Clarence Alvord, The Mississippi Valley in British Politics: A Study of the Trade, Land Speculation, and
Experiments in Imperialism Culminating in the American Revolution, Volume I (Cleveland: The Arthur Clark
Company, 1917), p. 301.
137
Morgan to Baynton and Wharton, December 10, 1767 (George Morgan Letter Book), in Alvord and Carter,
Trade and Politics, p. 132.
138
Butricke to Barnsley, September 15, 1768, in Alvord and Carter, Trade and Politics, p. 409.
136
215
Chartres. Lieutenant Eddington described the French Guard: “…compos’d of old Men
looking like Invalids without any sort of uniform. Most of them had on Jackets of different
colours and slouch’d Hats, and their Arms seem’d to be old and in very indifferent order.”139
There were 20 men under “Monsieur St. Ange,” who insisted that the British should strike
the French Flag.140 St. Ange would never himself lower the “Pavilion Francais.”141 In a
private letter Lieutenant Eddingstone [Eddington] commented, “The French Troops we
relieved here might be called anything but Soldiers, in Short I defy the best drol comick to
represent them at Drury Lane.”142 Eddington also had little praise for the fort itself. The
buildings and Barracks were very dirty, he wrote, and “Very long weeds several feet high
were growing all over the Square and round the wall.”143 The official inventory of Fort
Chartres, conducted by Captain Stirling, lists many items “of bad quality,” “bad,” or
“damaged.”144 Through these brief impressions can be glimpsed an impoverished country
whose material goods had been compromised by seven years of war and not replenished
through trade, whose labor force could no longer care for the great limestone fort. The
striking of the Fleur-de-Lys and the raising of the St. George took place in a brief, emotional
ceremony at the gates of the fort (Lt. Eddington describes the “great Chagrin” of the “Honest
Old Veterans” assembled under St. Ange145). Located well outside the fort, at a distance of
“quarant toises” sat a structure listed by Captain Stirling in his inventory as a “Pent House for
139
“Journal of Lt. Eddington,” in Broadswords & Bayonets, p. 83.
Captain Louis St. Ange de Bellerive was at the time of the French surrender 60 years old. He had served in
the French armies in Canada and the Illinois for about forty years. After surrendering Fort Chartres, he and his
men crossed the Mississippi to St. Louis. See James F. Keefe, “The Inventory of Fort Des Chartres, “in
Muzzleloader, Volume XVIII (6), January/February 1992, p. 45-46.
141
“Journal of Captain Thomas Stirling,” in Broadswords & Bayonets, p. 45.
142
Letter from Lt. Eddingstone, October 16, 1765, in Alvord and Carter, The New Regime, p. 106.
143
“Journal of Lt. Eddington,” p. 84.
144
See “Inventory of the Goods at Fort De Chartres,” in Alvord and Carter, The New Regime, p.102-104.
145
“Journal of Lt. Eddington,” p. 83.
140
216
the use of Savages.” The French version gives this structure as a “Hangard.”146 In this stone
building had often been retained Indian guests as well as prisoners since the completion of
the fort in 1754. No written accounts mention the presence of a single Indian at the cession
of the fort. Yet the implicit statement of the Hangard, its mute witnessing of the shift of
empire, and its presence outside the walls of the fort summon the Indians. Although
ostensibly not present that October day, their influence on the French and British was the
single strongest factor determining the relations between the two in the Illinois Country.
146
See “Cession of Fort de Chartres, October 10, 1765,” in Alvord and Carter, The New Regime, p. 100.
217
Across the River: The Missouri Lands, 1765 - 1775
The Illinois Indians living near the French villages along the Mississippi were in a niche
location between powerful adversaries to the north and also to the south. Competition for
peltries and buffalo in the upper Mississippi Valley made them enemies of the Fox, Sauk,
and Sioux nations; to the south, the Chickasaw and Cherokee, long allied with the British,
resented any infringement into their deerskin trade.1 The Illinois have been studied in two
broad patterns: as warring tribes beleaguered through decades of guerrilla attacks – from
traditional, long-documented adversaries – and as tribes faithfully allied with the French.
Historians have not paid enough attention to how relations with traditional Illinois allies –
such as the Osage – may have shifted over the course of the eighteenth century. Indian
groups could maintain superficial loyalties to each other while jockeying for the best
positions as new Europeans powers took over the Mississippi River trade. These relations
were further complicated by a visibly changing environment. Comparative studies of the
west and east bank Indians can reveal much about economic factors, especially about the
differing roles of horses, wood overexploitation and deforestation, and the hunting of white
tail deer in diverse landscapes.
If the evolved, domiciled villages of the Illinois were in a “unique” relation with the
French villages, as is often attested, then other unique factors were also at play in the
Missouri lands.2 One of those was the sheer, unequaled abundance of oak varieties in the
1
One of the best overviews of these southern Indians and their allegiances is found in Daniel J. Usner, Indians,
Settlers & Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: the Lower Mississippi Valley Before 1763 (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina, 1992). See particularly the chapter, “The Indian Alliance Network of a Marginal
European Colony,” pp. 77 – 100.
2
For this pervasive concept, note Lord Shelburne writing to the Lords of Trade in 1767 that the goal of his
western policy was to create a situation in which “those Savages, who are hemmed in by our settlements on
both sides, must ... become domiciliated, & reconciled to our Laws and Manners.” The concept of the “passive,
218
Ozark highlands. The presence of Bur Oak, especially, helped to form the oak openings and
savannas where deer often grazed; the Bur Oak root system is so extensive – creating a belled
circumference as wide as the tree crown itself – that these oaks create open land between
them, being in a sense, their own competitors.3 Bur Oaks can be pivotal and even relentless
in aforestation. One botanist has concluded that “some ecologists believe that the only thing
that prevented the Bur Oak from making forest states out of everything east of the Missouri
was the constant firing of the region by the Indians in their hunting drives.”4 Bur Oak
forests provided immense quantities of acorns, but almost as important, “deer could be
hunted through these groves on horseback.”5 While Bur Oak was also ubiquitous in Illinois,
the French had selectively chosen it for home, fence, barn, and furniture construction. The
presence of so much unlogged oak in Missouri – an oak hegemony – may have played a role
in the economic history of the area. The story of the Osage ascendancy post 1763 is tied to a
particular, diverse natural environment. In the same time period, the story of the Illinois
Indians is tied to the east-bank topography and altered floodplain of the Illinois Country.
These tribes were living in contiguous lands and were frequently in contact. Yet one nation
was increasing its population and power while the other was continuing to lose so many
domiciled Indian” living next to Europeans was one the British admired about the French arrangement. See
Shelburne in Clarence Alvord and Clarence Carter, Trade and Politics 1767 – 1769 (Springfield, Illinois:
Illinois State Historical Library, 1921), p. 80; Carl J. Ekberg has written that “Hostile Indians seem to have
been a major reason why the center of the French Illinois Country developed on the east bank rather than the
west bank of the Mississippi.” See Colonial Ste. Genevieve: An Adventure on the Mississippi Frontier (Gerald,
Missouri: The Patrice Press, 1985), p. 7. See also Wayne C. Temple: “The Kaskaskia, however, became quite
docile under the rule of the French...” Indian Villages of the Illinois Country: Historic Tribes (Springfield,
Illinois: Illinois State Museum, 1958), p. 48.
3
See this discussion in Donald Culross Peattie, A Natural History of Trees of Eastern and Central North
America (New York: Bonanza Books, 1968), pp. 213 – 218.
4
Donald Culross Peattie, A Natural History, p. 215.
5
Peattie, p. 214.
219
people that “the Kaskaskia in 1796 numbered only eight or ten men.”6 The natural
environment played a significant role in these divergent histories.
By the late 1760’s so many people were using the western rivers that they began to
function as well-known, reliable roads. For the western Indians, the rivers had always been
arterial, vital routes that linked them in all directions to kin, allies, and trade fairs. Europeans
on these waterways established the names of the rivers on maps; and maps as well as trade
drew an increasing number of people embarking upon the river routes for the first time. The
transport system evolving in the mid-eighteenth century connected the Great Lakes,
especially Lake Michigan, via the conduit south using the Chicago, Des Plaines, and Illinois
Rivers to reach the Mississippi. The eastern banks of that widening river were channeled
with the inrushing Rock, Illinois, Wood, and Kaskaskia Rivers, all draining the Illinois
watershed. On the western bank, the Des Moines, Missouri, Osage, and Meramec fed the
slowly-swelling Mississippi well above the Ohio confluence. There, two immense rivers
created a striated intersection into which swirled canoes, pirogues, batteaux, and flatboats,
often carried sideways out into a current variously described as “raging,” “gentle,” “heavy,”
“troubling,” or “noisy.” In 1790, an anonymous cartographer noted, “The River Mississippi
has a smooth, heavy current...the Missouri has its Sources either in, or passes thro, some
inexhaustible body of white clay....” The writer mentions the commingling of the Missouri’s
“whiteness” with the Mississippi so that the newly-blended river was ribboned with opaque
streaks “even after the Ohio enters it with several other rivers....”7 Perceptions of color, of
alternating streams of turbid blue, brown, white, and red characterize historical accounts of
the Mississippi as it gathered waters from both sides. In 1678 Father Marquette had penned
6
Wayne C. Temple, Indian Villages, p. 54.
Cited in John White, Big Rivers Area Assessment, Volume 5: Early Accounts of the Ecology of the Big Rivers
Area (Springfield, Illinois: Illinois Department of Natural Resources, 2000), p. 42.
7
220
the earliest description of the high, clifty land near the confluence of the Mississippi and
“Ouaboukigou” (a word that became the Wabash, often used by the French for the Ohio
River). He perceived “A sticky earth is found there, of three different colors – purple, violet,
and Red. The water in which the latter is washed assumes a bloody tinge.” Father Marquette
noted that if he smeared this red earth on a paddle, it “was dyed with its color, so deeply that
the water could not wash it away during the 15 days while I used it for paddling.”8
Born on those variegated streams were other streams: a continuous flow of information
about sightings, incursions, illegal trading, ambushes, war parties, skirmishes, “foreign
Indians,” Indians in canoe flotillas, hunting parties silhouetted on the bluffs, trading post
operations, and the activities of a host of human beings from at least twenty Indian nations
and three international empires. In 1762, by the secret Treaty of Fontainebleu, France had
ceded to Spain its western holdings in Louisiana. While the British reached the Illinois two
years after the Treaty of Paris, the Spanish did not officially arrive in the St. Louis area until
1770.9 Before the appearance in the Missouri lands of the first Spanish lieutenant-governor,
Don Pedro Piernas, the British had initiated “an exchange of notes” with Spanish authorities.
Such “notes” resulted in decrees that forbade Spanish subjects to cross the Mississippi into
British territory and British traders to enter “Upper Luisiana” via the same riverine route.10
8
Father Pierre Marquette, cited in Reuben Gold Thwaites, The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents: Travels
and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in North America 1610 – 1791 (New York: The Vanguard Press,
1954), p. 359 – 360.
9
John Francis Bannon, The Spanish Borderlands Frontier 1513 – 1821 (Albuquerque: University of New
Mexico Press, 1963), p. 194. Bannon has used the term “Quasi-Borderland” to describe the Spanish province of
“Luisiana.” Valuable in this work is the comprehensive bibliography of work on Spanish America, especially
those works listed for “The Illinois Country” and “The Spaniards in Upper Louisiana.” See also New Spain and
the Anglo-American West: Historical Contributions presented to Herbert Eugene Bolton (Lancaster,
Pennsylvania: Lancaster Press, Inc., 1932), especially the essay in Volume I, “American Penetration into
Spanish Louisiana,” by Lawrence Kinnaird. The best overview of the middle-Mississippi Valley international
rivalries is still Abraham P. Nasatir’s lengthy introduction to the collection of documents in Before Lewis and
Clark (St. Louis, 1952). Nasatir remains the authority on the Upper Mississippi Valley in Spanish Louisiana.
10
A. P. Nasatir, “The Anglo-Spanish Frontier in the Illinois Country During the American Revolution, 1779 –
1783,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Vol. XXI (3), October, 1928, p. 292.
221
During these polite negotiations, French Catholics on the eastern shores crossed the
Mississippi at night, taking their slaves and poling even their cattle across, to re-settle in St.
Genevieve and the new fur center of St. Louis. Due to channel changes in the Mississippi
River, crossing to the western shore would not have required much effort; the waters were
lapping at the streets of Chartres (see Chapter Six). An early history of St. Louis describes
the river in relation to the infant town:
The slope of the hills on the river-side was covered by a growth of heavy timber...which
terminated in a point on the very margin of the river...the Mississippi was very deep, but
a great deal narrower than it is now, as it is stated by the old inhabitants that persons
could converse with each other across it, without effort.11
While this account somewhat stretches the imagination, it is true that the river in the 1760’s
afforded an ease of crossing in most seasons. There are even accounts of American citizens
walking across the frozen Mississippi, and one particular story relates a celebrated, longremembered horse race down the center of the rock-hard river between an “Illinois” horse
and a “Missouri” horse.12 In addition, the Mississippi and its tributaries in the Illinois
Country were unsurpassed as conduits of information. The “distant Illinois” of Captain
Thomas Stirling’s expedition may have been distant, but it was not trackless wilderness
punctuated with isolated smoke plumes. Indian tribes had engaged in periodic riverine
migrations and relocations for most of the eighteenth century. French trappers and voyageurs
descended the Mississippi from the Falls of St. Anthony, converging on the trade matrix at
Fort Chartres. Tediously rowing and corbelling upriver from New Orleans, French Creole
and recently-emigrated traders and merchants stopped at early settlements like Natchez,
Baton Rouge, Arkansas Post, and the bluff outpost of latter-day Memphis. From the Great
11
J.N. Nicollet, “Sketch of the Early History of St. Louis,” in John Francis McDermott, editor, The Early
Histories of St. Louis (St. Louis: St. Louis Historical Documents Foundation, 1952), p. 136.
12
Brink, McDonough, and Co., History of St. Clair County (Philadelphia: 1881), p. 59.
222
Lakes streamed trappers, traders, and Indians using the portage at St. Joseph near the
Kankakee to reach the Illinois River and descend to the heart of the Illinois Country.
Historical records can only hint at the amount of traffic on the rivers in the decades
preceding the American Revolution. Figures available at mid-century from Montreal, listing
the number of conges (trade licenses) granted to voyageurs as well as the number of men and
canoes engaged in the trade down the Mississippi give some indication of the numbers of
legally-sanctioned traders.13
1740
32 conges
57 canoes
336 men engaged
1743
54 conges
68 canoes
417 men engaged
74 canoes
419 men engaged14
1750
The number of unlicensed French traders and trappers was almost certainly greater. One
study of the French trading posts above the American Bottom, those “farflung” bluff and
high hill country outposts of French Wisconsin, summarizes the human traffic on the rivers:
“They came and went without record.”15 While no thorough historical investigation exists
into the flow of men in an illegal riverine trade on the upper Mississippi and Missouri, there
is evidence, especially from the increasingly hostile interactions of the Missouri and Osage
Indians and the French, that unlicensed and unscrupulous traders were cheating their
suppliers.16 The pattern escalated as a result of war. At the end of King George’s War (1744
13
Conge is defined in the Mississippi Provincial Archives as “a technical term referring to permits to trade
directly with the Indians for fur, which were granted by the governor of Canada.” See MVP, Vol. 4 (Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1927), p. 248.
14
This data selected from a table in Norman W. Caldwell, The French in the Mississippi Valley 1740 – 1750
(Urbana, Illinois: The University of Illinois Press, 1941), doctoral dissertation in the Newberry Library,
Chicago, Illinois. See Table on page 60.
15
Glenn T. Trewartha, “A Second Epoch of Destructive Occupance in the Driftless Hill Land (1760 – 1832:
Period of British, Spanish, and Early American Control),” Annals of the Association of American Geographers,
Vol. 30 (2), June, 1940, p. 109.
16
For the best study of the illegal fur trade in Canada and New York, see Jean Lunn, “The Illegal Fur Trade Out
of New France, 1713 – 1760,” Canadian Historical Association Annual Report, 1939, pp. 61–76. Lunn states
223
–1748), tantalizingly higher prices for beaver lured French Canadian voyageurs across the
Mississippi. Although estimates in the 1740’s and 1750’s of Missouri and Osage Indian tribe
populations were quite low – at 500 “men” and fewer – there was yet “much trouble”
between Indians and especially, unlicensed French traders. These traders were often found
murdered on the banks of rivers.17 A “Memoir Upon the State of the Colony of Louisiana in
1746” noted “...as long as the beavers are at a high price, the voyageurs redouble their
industry to encourage the Indians to winter in beaver country....”18 This practice, of French
traders following Indians into rich fur country, distinguished the French fur harvesting from
the British.
The British initially planned to set up scattered posts and trading sites throughout their
new holdings in the western lands. There are repeated references in British correspondence to
the necessity of building forts at the mouths of the Illinois and the Wabash or Ohio.19 Yet
even these proposed forts (which never materialized) would have required Indians to travel
fair distances to trade. Although Indians in the seventeenth century had been used to
canoeing down the rivers of the subarctic region to reach the early posts like Tadoussac,
Quebec, and Trois Rivieres, by the 1760’s, the competition for Indian trade had crafted a
comfortable system for Indians of French traders readily available in their own villages and
hunting grounds. One historian has commented that the proposed British system of setting
that “in the early years of the period...some estimates placed the annual export at roughly a half or two-thirds of
the total quality of beaver produced in Canada each year...” See Lunn, p. 65. Her interesting conclusion,
unexplored in subsequent scholarship, is that the illegal fur trade between Montreal and Albany dictated the
course of empire. “Had the trade with Montreal been cut off, Albany must have tried much earlier and much
more vigorously than it did to establish direct relations with the Indians in the west.” See Lunn, p. 76.
17
Norman W. Caldwell, The French, p. 74.
18
See Norman W. Caldwell, The French, pp. 60 – 61.
19
See for instance, General Gage’s discussion of the ideas put forth by Captain Harry Gordon: “...to erect Posts
on the Rivers Ohio and Illinois near their Junction with the Mississippi, in order to prevent all Furrs and Skins
from coming into the River from the Eastern Branches...” in Gage to Shelburne, February 22, 1767, in Newton
D. Mereness, Travels in the American Colonies (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1916), p. 459.
224
up a handful of forts was “running contrary to customs a hundred years old.”20 Ironically,
however, it was the presence of French Canadian traders and trappers in the Indian camps
and villages that created animosity. Abuses of trade by “coureur du bois” resulted in the
murder of French traders during and after the Seven Years War.21
After the British arrived in the Illinois, British traders “poured into” the Great Lakes
region and fanned out into the Upper Mississippi.22 Their numbers eventually caused
General Gage to change his mind about the efficacy of building forts at the mouths of the
Illinois and Ohio Rivers. The British policy of controlling all trade through forts and
outposts would be futile since the Indian tribes were “so numerous.” Skilled traders and
Indians long used to the river systems and character could silently skiff by the forts at night.23
Gage felt that regulation of traders was necessary, via a system of strict licenses and trading
rules. Yet just as French and British hunters competed for buffalo on the Grand Prairies,
subjects from both countries – as well as Spanish emigrating north – were thronging on the
rivers and crossing into the Missouri lands in a drive to reach the fur basin of the TransMississippi West. As French and Indians migrated across the Mississippi to Spanish
Louisiana in the 1760’s, new French settlements on the western banks of the Mississippi
began to appear. St. Louis, Vide-Poche, and Carondelet grew upriver from the earlier,
20
Clarence Alvord, The Mississippi Valley in British Politics: A Study of the Trade, Land Speculation, and
Experiments in Imperialism Culminating in the American Revolution, Volume I (Cleveland: The Arthur Clark
Company, 1917), p. 296.
21
See detailed analysis of French-Indian trade relations in Theresa J. Piazza, “The Kaskaskia Manuscripts:
French Traders in the Missouri Valley Before Lewis and Clark,” The Missouri Archaeologist, Volume 53,
December, 1992, pp. 1-42. Animosity persisted into the French settlement phase as well (and under the Spanish
regime). Also see local treatments such as Kathleen Brotherton, “Osage occasionally killed early French
settlers,” River Hills Traveler, January/February, 2004.
22
Alvord, The Mississippi Valley, p. 300.
23
Alvord, The Mississippi Valley, pp 307-308.
225
southernmost French village of St. Genevieve.24 With the exception of St. Genevieve, an
early lead-mining, saltworks, and agricultural village, these new settlements were wholly
thriving on the fur trade. French and Spanish trappers were pushing west and then north, up
the Missouri River, meeting descending Indian nations who had transferred their activities
from Fort Chartres to St. Louis. Studies of the Osage Indians, especially, indicate an
aggressive adaptation to the fur market economy across the 1760’s and 1770’s, resulting in
what one historian has termed the “prairie hegemony” of the Osage.25 In 1757, the Osage
marketed 8,000 pounds of bear and deerskins; by 1773, they were producing 22,000
pounds.26 The ascendancy of the Missouri Osage, both Little and Great bands, is an
important factor in understanding the experience of the British and the eastern Mississippi
Indians. And that ascendancy had much to do with the reality of Osage population: they
remained “numerically strong” in their forested Ozark highlands, rarely experiencing the
decimation of disease which periodically swept across the open prairies of the Illinois
country.27
24
For a concise overview of these towns, see the account by J.N. Nicollet, “Sketch of the Early History of St.
Louis,” in John Francis McDermott, Early Histories of St. Louis (St. Louis: St. Louis Historical Documents
Foundation, 1952) pp. 131 – 148. For St. Genevieve and its relation to the French settlements on the eastern
side of the river, see Carl J. Ekberg, Colonial Ste. Genevieve: An Adventure on the Mississippi Frontier (Gerald,
Missouri: The Patrice Press, 1985).
25
Willard Hughes Rollings conducted the standard ethnohistorical study of the Osage in his 1983 dissertation,
“Prairie Hegemony: An Ethnohistorical Study of the Osage, From Early Times to 1840.” Unpublished bound
copies of this study are in many libraries. As Richard White persuasively argues in “The Winning of the West:
the Expansion of the Western Sioux in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” Rollings attributes the rise of
the Osage and their control of the interior Missouri lands through raids and warfare as a direct expression of
competition for natural resources. The Osage south of the Missouri River were the most powerful and feared
tribe, mirroring the aggressive activities of the Sioux north of the Missouri. See Richard White’s discussion in
The Journal of American History 65 (September 1978), pp. 319-343.
26
Willard Hughes Rollings, “Prairie Hegemony: An Ethnohistorical Study of the Osage, From Early Times to
1840,” unpublished doctoral dissertation, Texas Tech University, 1983, p. 214.
27
Rollings, “Prairie Hegemony,” p. 203. The Missouri Indians, in contrast, did evidently suffer from smallpox
epidemics. See Berlin Basil Chapman, Oto and Missouri Indians (New York: Garland Publishing Company,
1974), pp. 6-7.
226
Historically, because of the great natural demarcation of the Mississippi River, studies of
the fur trade have tended to separate patterns of fur and hide harvesting. The natural riverine
boundary may have created an artificial historical boundary. The opening up of the Missouri
River trade lands under the Spanish regime seems to inaugurate a distinct era in fur trade
history: the narrative celebrates the Chouteau brothers of St. Louis, their eventual monopoly
of trade privileges with the Osage, even to the extent of building a fort among them, and the
evolution of the Missouri River trade under such Spanish traders as Manuel Lisa in the
1790’s. Yet the commercial success and military strength of the Osage placed increasing
resource pressure on the tribes of the Illinois country to the east. Treating the Illinois bands
as Indians “left behind” in the trade obscures the effect of inter-tribal competition on
European political experience in the Illinois Country. Historians have often interpreted the
disintegration of Indian life and subsequent violence against incoming white settlers as
territorial defense of ancestral grounds.28 Some of the roots of that violence, however, which
took its last form in the guerrilla raids of the Grand Prairie Kickapoo before the War of 1812,
are found in the changing, destabilized relations between the smaller bands of east-bank
Mississippi River Indians and the ascendant Osage.
“...Osage make themselves masters of all the hunting country....”29
The Osage were able to use both types of trade, legal and illegal, in a skillful interplay
with a wide swath of international populations. Some semi-sedentary bands of Osage lived
in “close proximity” to French and Spanish settlements in Spanish Missouri, trading with
28
For example, see the chapters entitled “Defenders of the Manitou” and “A War of Extirpation” by John Mack
Faragher in Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois Prairie (1986).
29
Log of Galiot La Fleche, Spanish commander at Arkansas Post, in Nasastir Papers, Chapter 4, p. 119, cited in
Rollings, p. 216.
227
licensed traders in New Madrid, St. Genevieve, Saint Charles, and Saint Louis. Other Osage,
ignoring Spanish trade rules forbidding traffic in Indian slaves, livestock, or munitions,
continued to trade with unlicensed and illegal traders in the interior Missouri lands. As early
as 1768, the Osage had signaled their defiance to the Spanish in a symbolic gesture: only
four days after the opening of Fort Carlos III at the confluence of the Missouri and
Mississippi Rivers, a party of Osage and Missouri Indians arrived and planted a British flag
on the river bank. This incensed the Spanish soldiers and “caused them to rise up in arms.”30
Such bravado would characterize most of the Osage policy toward Europeans of three
nations. Continuing to seek illegal traders clustering thickly along the Arkansas River to the
south, Osage established a “lucrative market” in several directions.31 One historian of the
Osage concludes that “it is clear that by the 1770’s the Osage dominated the fur trade of
Saint Louis and Spanish Illinois.” Preferring to trade in deerskins, the Osage were supplying
as much as 64 percent of the total market in the deerskin trade, including 98 percent of the
trade in untanned deerskins. They may have supplied as much as 88 percent of bearskins.32
In April of 1778 the commandant of Spanish Arkansas, Balthazar DeVilliers, wrote to
Bernardo de Galvez, Governor of Louisiana, that the fur trade of the Osage was “the most
lucrative and the most interesting of the Illinois.”33
Comparisons of the Osage and the Illinois tribes in the decades following 1763 can help to
complicate plastic and facile interpretations of the Illinois as a degraded people. The gradual
“winking out” of two of the four remaining tribes has been documented, especially in the
demographic studies of Emily Blasingham (the Kaskaskia and the Peoria live today in
30
A. P. Nasatir, “The Anglo-Spanish Frontier,” p. 293.
See discussion of the Osage trade patterns under the Spanish in Rollings, pp. 213-214.
32
Rollings, “Prairie Hegemony,” p. 215.
33
DeVilliers to Galvez, April 25, 1778, cited in Rollings, p. 215.
31
228
Oklahoma with the Weas and Piankeshaws, removed there after a treaty in 1832 – and “all
use the collective name Peoria.”34). Characterizations of the very-reduced Illinois as noncompetitive, eroded culturally by European contact, and desperately dependent on gifts and
trade goods have arisen from the biased perceptions of European observers in the eighteenth
century. A comment by Colonel Wilkins at Fort Chartres in 1771 is typical; he considered the
Mechigamia “a weak and poor Nation....”35 Earlier, in 1765, Captain Philip Pittman had
described the Illinois as “resid[ing] near the English settlements in this country, where they
have built their huts. They are a poor, debauched, and dastardly people.”36 Such
interpretations ignore the importance of two environmental factors promoting the rise of the
Osage and limiting the Illinois Indians: continuous access to horses and a variegated, diverse
hunting territory. Such territory had not been touched by the force of deforestation when the
deerskin trade accelerated after 1763. Many timber margins and prairie-woodland edge
habitats comprised a landscape mosaic in Missouri. Rich oak-hickory highlands opened
gradually to riverine prairies – the prime domain of the white-tailed deer. These edge, or
ecotonal, habitats “generated by Indian-set fires” as well as the natural openings created by
large fallen trees shaped a land characterized as “open woodlands, closed forests, and edge
habitats.”37 In these habitats, pre-settlement deer populations were likely maintained at two
per square kilometer, held steady through selective hunting and natural predation. An
“explosion” of deer populations eventually occurred in the historic period, where “deer
34
Robert M. Owens, “Jean Baptiste Ducoigne, the Kaskaskias, and the Limits of Thomas Jefferson’s
Friendship,” Journal of Illinois History, Vol. 5:2, Summer, 2002, p. 136, n67.
35
Wilkins cited in Joseph Jablow, Indians of Illinois and Indiana (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1974),
p. 275.
36
Captain Philip Pittman, The Present State of European Settlements on the Mississippi, With a Geographical
Description of that River illustrated by Plans and Draughts (Cleveland: The Arthur H. Clark Company, 1906
(1770)), p. 97.
37
Gordon G. Whitney, From Coastal Wilderness to Fruited Plain: A History of Environmental Change in
Temperate North America from 1500 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 119.
229
densities in excess of eight to ten deer per square kilometer,” are connected with the
elimination of deer predators through the fur trade and bounty-hunting.38 An additional
factor actually promoting the increase in deer population is inter-tribal hostility. While
armed, mounted parties of Indians could pass attractive deer targets on the way to planned
attacks, taking animals opportunistically was a danger. Any animal remains would attract
vultures, which often warned enemy tribes.39 The two activities – hunting and warfare – were
carefully regulated and governed by clear sets of cultural rituals. Between 1770 and 1800,
Indian tribes like the Osage were almost constantly involved in resource-driven hostilities
with many other tribes to the south of the Missouri River. Although their deer hunting did
seriously deplete white tail populations, the broader, long-term picture of deer populations
across centuries suggests great shifts fostered by disruptive patterns of both fur trading and
warfare.40 What happened historically in the adaptive ascendancy of the Osage – and what
didn’t happen across the Mississippi River with the Illinois tribes – is the result of many
human and environmental factors. Two of these are the deer and the horse.
The account left by Commander Macarty of the arrival of Mechigamia, Cahokia and
Peoria Indians at Fort Chartres in 1752 contains one of the only descriptions in which the
mode of travel of Illinois Indians is documented. A week after a decimating attack by the
Fox Indians (see Chapter Five), the Indians received a (false) report of a second Fox attack.
They abandoned their villages and converged on the fort for safety. “All the men, women,
and children of the three Illinois villages reached here early in the morning, having walked
38
Gordon G. Whitney, From Coastal Wilderness, p. 313.
Personal communication, Thomas D. Morgan, September 19, 2004.
40
Richard White discusses the interplay of hunting and warfare in controlling deer populations among the
Choctaw in Roots of Dependency: subsistence, environment, and social change among the Choctaws, Pawnees,
and Navajos (Omaha: University of Nebraska Press, 1983).
39
230
all night in a continual rain....”41 The three villages mentioned here are the two villages of
the Mechigamea and the Cahokia village, all north of Fort Chartres. Only the settlement of
the Kaskaskia Indians lay to the south. The Cahokia, in fact, lived at least thirty miles to the
north. Why weren’t these Indians, traveling at night through the rain, desperate for the
protection of the fort, using horses? While all their animals may have been stolen in the Fox
raid, those attacking Indians had converged on the Illinois Indian villages by canoe (see
account of this raid in Chapter Five). Stealing an entire horse herd would have been difficult.
So few accounts of the Illinois Indians mention them on horseback that a general historical
sense of the Mechigamea and Cahokia especially, implies a people conducting their lives and
daily activities on foot. Paths leading to their villages inscribe a landscape of pedestrian
traffic; and except in deepest winter, when the river bottoms lay silent under scarves of heavy
mist and ice plates shimmered from bank to bank, the rivers provided a constant transport.
Summer and winter hunts would have required horses, and Commander Macarty states
specifically that the Mechigamea “traded horses” with the Missouri tribes. But accounts of
horses in the Illinois settlements, post 1750, usually link the animals to the French, the
“sturdy French ponies,” the “point ponies.” The De Gannes Memoir of the early eighteenth
century, describing the Peoria Indians, states they obtained horses from the Pawnee and
Wichita Indians to use for buffalo hunts. The horses came branded on their hind quarters and
were called canatis.42 French accounts of the Mechigamea village located north of Fort
Chartres, along the river, mention Indian livestock “running” there. One of the early
memorials of Bienville, describing his plans to build “the strongest establishment that we
41
Commander Macarty writing in Illinois On the Eve of the Seven Years War, Illinois Historical Collections 29,
p. 657, cited in Joseph Jablow, Indians, p. 217.
42
Pierre Deliette, “Memoir of De Gannes Concerning the Illinois Country,” in T. C. Pease, The French
Foundations 1680-1693 (Springfield: Illinois State Historical Library, 1934) p. 389.
231
can...in the western part of this colony [Spanish borderlands]” mentions obtaining “a quantity
of horses...from the Indians of the upper part of this river [the Mississippi].”43 It is not clear
which Indian tribes he had in mind, but at that time, the 1720’s and 1730’s, the upper
Mississippi Valley Indians were obviously seen as sources for horses. The decimation of the
Illinois in the Chickasaw Campaign and the Fox Wars likely changed this and perhaps
affected their horse populations as well. By 1752, Commander Macarty was identifying the
Osage as the source of Illinois Indian horses.44 Although horses would provide natural
increase if well cared for, the grazing lands of the domiciled Illinois Indians were
circumscribed by ancient French grants. The edges of the “Mechigamea Prairie,” for
instance, north of Fort Chartres, abutted the French village of St. Philippe. Indian horses may
have been overworked in hunting and packing meat; and as also occurred with the Osage,
exhausted mares did not foal. Replenishing horses through raiding did not seem to have been
a pattern in the Illinois Country. Over sixty years, the Illinois Indians had gradually
relinquished their role as tribal raiders. By the time of the British occupation, the horse
reserves of the Illinois Indians could never have equaled those of the Osage.
Most Indian tribes were trading with each other, or raiding, to obtain horses. While the
Kaskaskia Indians had been the most successful agriculturally, and are documented in the
French Regime as having livestock and horses, the other Illinois tribes seem to have “crossed
the river” to obtain their horses. Buying or trading for horses via the old Spanish trade
networks that criss-crossed the Plains Indians’ territory would involve swimming or
transporting the animals across inland Missouri territory rivers and across the Mississippi,
43
See Memorial of Bienville, Mississippi Provincial Archives, Vol. 3, p. 315.
Commander Macarty, cited in Raymond Hauser, “The Ethnohistory of the Illinois Indian Tribe,” unpublished
doctoral dissertation, 1973, p. 149. Copies are available at the Illinois Historical Survey and the Newberry
Library.
44
232
that chimerical, unpredictable waterway. Efforts of the French to float horses and cattle
downriver to supply such military efforts as the Chickasaw Campaign in the 1730’s had
sometimes been disastrous. Mention of capsizement and drowned animals occurs in letters.
In 1719, a trader obtained at least fourteen horses from the Osage, but lost six horses and a
colt while crossing a stream.45 Preparing for his Chickasaw Campaign of 1739, Bienville
bought 77 yoke of oxen and 80 horses from the Illinois colonies but documents that 30 horses
“were lost” or perished on the way to Arkansas Post.46 Water levels in the eighteenth
century were significantly higher; in heavy rain, streams and rivers rose dangerously. In the
inland Ozark highlands especially were streams and springs dissecting the slopes, creating an
erosional landscape of “poor and rugged hills,” through which waterways ran with “devious
courses.” Hydrographic studies of stream rise and flash flooding in the Ozarks have found
valleys “...without the semblance of a stream in the evening [holding] torrents the next
morning which a man on horseback could not ford.” As also occurring in the Illinois
Country, natural springs were profuse: in one Ozark county alone were counted 2,400 “living
springs.”47 Yet the Illinois Country has never been described as “rugged.” The sheer
limestone bluffs which separate the floodplain from the upland prairies constitute the steepest
rise. In St. Clair County, the highest point of land is Turkey Hill, overlooking a “vast stretch
of prairie and valley, 20 – 30 miles.”48 A country of prairies and plains, punctuated with oakhickory savannahs, the Illinois has no steep gradients (excepting the river bluffs) and no
mountainous terrain. And at the time the deerskin trade was becoming important in the
45
Nancy M. Miller Surrey, The Commerce of Louisiana During the French Regime, 1699-1763 ( New Orleans:
Polyanthos, 1916), p. 302.
46
See Bienville’s “Deliberations of the council of war” in Mississippi Provincial Archives, Vol. 1, p. 428.
47
For a discussion of water and flooding in the Ozark Highlands, see Carl O. Sauer, The Geography of the
Ozark Highland of Missouri (New York: Greenwood Press, 1920), pp. 49 – 52.
48
Brink, McDonough and Co., History of St. Clair County (Philadelphia: 1881), p. 30-31.
233
Missouri lands, the Illinois lived on the “English” side of the river. The Mississippi was an
international boundary that eventually became policed and patrolled by the Spanish.49 The
Osage, even in their traditional village sites along the Missouri, faced few transportation or
boundary issues. They could trade (or raid) with tribes to the Southwest without crossing a
clear international border. They claimed and roamed the land on both sides of the Missouri
River and would have known ideal fording spots.
The Osage were in fact historically placed to participate in the lucrative trade networks to
the Spanish Southwest; they almost certainly had horses by 1693. An Osage tribal legend
describes the first encounter of Osage with the horse. When a party of mounted Kiowa
materialized out of an alkali dust cloud on the plains, Osage ran screaming and weeping in
terror from the “mystery dogs.”50 Southern Plains Indians had begun to integrate the horse
into their hunting and warring some time after 1600, with the Santa Fe becoming the center
of the distribution. More tribes became “horse Indians” after 1630; in 1680, the spread of the
horse was greatly accelerated by the Pueblo Revolt, in which many thousands of animals,
including horses, were seized and traded to the East.51 However, the use of the horse among
specific tribes in the southern Great Plains indicates a mixed record of adaptation. The
Frenchman Du Tisne found 300 horses among the Pawnee in 1719, yet in 1724, Kansas
Indians accompanying the French explorer Bourgmont up the Missouri River used no horses
and “300 dogs” to pull travois.52 The uneven history of horse adaptation suggests a larger,
more complex issue: anthropologists and historians have concentrated on cultural diffusion
49
See A.P. Nasatir, Spanish War Vessels on the Mississippi, 1792 – 1796 (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1968).
50
John Joseph Mathews, The Osage: Children of the Middle Waters (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press,
1961), p. 129.
51
See important work by Francis Haines, “Where Did the Plains Indians Get Their Horses?” American
Anthropologist, New Series XL (1), Jan-March, 1938, p.22; and “The Northward Spread of Horses Among the
Plains Indians,” American Anthropologist, New Series XL (3), July-Sept., 1938, p. 431.
52
Francis Haines, “The Northward Spread,” p. 432-433.
234
theories and ignored environmental and ecological constraints governing the spread and size
of horse herds.53 Earlier work by historians like John C. Ewers identified two broad
groupings of “horse-rich” southern Plains Indians; the first one included the Kiowa,
Comanche, Kiowa-Apache, and the Osage.54 Analyses of horses and weather, tying horse
herd size to a winter severity index and the mean growing season have revealed striking
patterns: tribes with the means to provide winter grazing for horse herds during the Little Ice
Age, 1550 – 1850 AD, were tribes who became characterized as “horse rich.”55
Caring for horses was directly connected to the yield of the land. The aboriginal horse had
a relatively small body size; its live weight ranged from 273 to 409 kilograms.56 Even so,
these horses needed to consume a great deal of forage. Providing that forage in winter was
extremely labor-intensive for tribes living in areas of bitter cold. Eastern plains Indians along
the Missouri River are described as having to cut down cottonwood trees, haul them to
village or camp, thaw them by fires, and then cut or peel off the bark for horses.57 Meager
diet of horses affected reproductive capacity as well, leading to limited natural increase. Such
tribes, known as “horse-poor,” resorted to horse raiding and stealing as the means of keeping
up their horse herds. The Plains Indians, including the Osage, were living in regions
“characterized by adjacent yet markedly different environmental settings.” Horse-poor
tribes, like some of the southern Siouan groups from South Dakota, led repeated raids against
the horse-rich Pawnee of Nebraska territory.58 The nature of the land was not uniform.
53
See Alan J. Osborn, “Ecological Aspects of Equestrian Adaptations in Aboriginal North America,” American
Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 85, No. 3, Sept., 1983, pp. 563 – 591.
54
See John C. Ewers, “The Horse in Blackfoot Indian Culture: with comparative material from other Western
tribes,” Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin No. 159 (1955), and “Were the Blackfoot Rich in Horses?”
American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 45 (4) Part I (Oct.-Dec., 1943), pp. 602 – 610.
55
Alan J. Osborn, “Ecological Aspects,” p. 569.
56
Osborn, p. 586.
57
Osborn, p. 567.
58
Osborn, p. 584.
235
Varying degrees of herbage, browse, grasslands, and trees created adjacent regions in which
the numbers of Indian horses also varied. Among the Pawnee, for example, horses did much
better when browsing on western buffalo grass, a nutrient-rich forage. The tallgrass prairies
that comprised some of the eastern Pawnee range were not as nutritive.59 The Osage, living
in their mixed-habitat lands, would have found it easier to procure horse forage than Plains
Indians felling stands of frozen cottonwoods along iced-over streams. An early twentiethcentury historian described Osage homelands:
Over the high plateau of the Ozarks and in the deep valleys cut through these plateaux
by water they reigned as masters. On the banks of the pellucid streams meandering
through the narrow villages, overhung by fragrant trees, with a background border
of abrupt and picturesque hills or perpendicular cliffs, they raised their lodges....60
This poetic description does reveal, nonetheless, the mosaic of environments in the Osage
range and suggests a natural diversity in diet for horses. Despite being less nutritious,
tallgrass prairie forage in particular may have been easier to procure in the winter than
shortgrass forage.
While the Osage could likely feed their horse herds, there is evidence that they did not
tend them or have much interest in breeding mares for natural increase. Observers in the
Spanish regime remarked that Osage “ran ragged” their mares, and few foaled.61 This may
have been due to raids from the north by the horse-poor Sioux and to the Osage’s
accelerating interest in the deerskin trade. One historian of the Osage has commented that
“the Osage domain had been patrolled by them like a great game refuge.”62 The
maintenance of that refuge became increasingly defensive as Osage experienced trade and
59
See Richard White, “The Cultural Landscape of the Pawnees,” in Rita Napier, ed., Kansas and the West: New
Perspectives (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2003) pp. 68 70.
60
Louis Houck, cited in Gilbert C. Din and A.P Nasatir, The Imperial Osages: Spanish-Indian Diplomacy in the
Mississippi Valley (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983), p. 5.
61
Din and Nasatir, The Imperial, p. 23.
62
John Joseph Mathews, The Osages, p. 515.
236
warfare pressures from the north and the east. They themselves became consummate horseraiders, but more often of European herds. In the late 1790’s, at the height of the trouble
between the Osage and the Spanish and French, Nicolas de Finiels left a vivid account of
their horse-stealing methods. He observed that they “disdained to flee upon the animals’
backs,” but rather, ran behind the startled horses, “spurring them on with their own speed,”
until all were beyond pursuit.63 The predation of the Osage on the hunting, trapping, and
living of both European and Indians has been well-documented. A significant aspect of their
horse acquisition is the connection to deer hunting. The horse made possible a consummate
mastery of the deerskin trade.
Studies of southern tribes like the Choctaw have identified this same intimate relation
between horse and deer. One historian who has studied the horse in the Choctaw culture
concludes, “Indeed, the incorporation of horses into the Choctaw culture is virtually
inseparable from the deerskin trade....”64 Like the horse in the Choctaw territory, Osage
horses allowed hunters to reach more distant areas, seeking the edges of the Ozark forests, to
the west where hardwoods shaded down to the Osage plains. The disturbed edges of
woodlands, ragged and intermittently opening to meadows, contained the highest deer
numbers. Patterns of hunting among southern Indians include women riding horses back to a
hunting/butchering site and “processing by hand,” or tanning, the deerskins.65 This process
involves more than just scraping a stretched hide. The tanning of a single skin is a laborintensive effort that takes approximately nine hours per skin. In addition to scraping, tanning
has multiple stages that include the use of animal brains (almost always freshly-killed deer
63
Nicolas de Finiels, An Account of Upper Louisiana, edited by Carl J. Ekberg and William Foley (Columbia:
University of Missouri Press, 1989), p. 90.
64
James Taylor Carson, “Horses and the Economy and Culture of the Choctaw Indians, 1690 – 1840,”
Ethnohistory, Vol. 41, No. 3, Summer, 1995, p. 497.
65
Carson, p. 497-498.
237
brains) as a medium to coat the de-fleshed skin; once whitened with smeared brains, the
thickly-coated skin would have been kneaded and stretched by hand, then carefully
smoked.66 Given the extraordinary number of deer skins brought out of the Missouri
highlands by the Osage, it is likely the woodlands contained deer processing or tanning
camps, set into clearings much as logging camps developed in the heart of the timber regions
to the south, or as the Mechigamea and Quapaw processed bear oil earlier in the century.
One indication that the Osage women were heavily drawn into the preparation of deerskins is
a significant change in traditional diet. Archaeologists studying the effects of the fur trade on
Osage culture have found that they apparently abandoned the gathering and consumption of
nuts at the same time as their ascendancy into the deerskin trade. Nut gathering and the
extraction of nutmeats and oils was probably the work of Osage women, who also planted
and tended crops. Osage traditionally consumed pecans, acorns, black walnuts, and
hazelnuts.67 The mortar and pestle pounding and the boiling of the crushed nuts (especially
in the case of walnut and hickory) consumed much time and effort.68 Archaeological studies
also document a decline in maize agriculture concomitant to the increase in hunting and
raiding.69 Eventually, perhaps, even the hand processing and tanning of deerskins took more
time than the Osage could spare. Figures from the late eighteenth century indicate the Osage
more and more preferred to bring in packs of untanned skins. While well-tanned deerskins –
66
For the most detailed description of the hand-tanning process, see John and Geri McPherson, “Brain Tan
Buckskin,” Primitive Wilderness & Survival Skills (Randolph, Kansas: Prairie Wolf, 1993), pp. 10 – 57.
67
Willard Rollings, “Prairie Hegemony,” p. 177; also Carl H. Chapman and Eleanor F. Chapman, Indians and
Archaeology of Missouri, Missouri Handbook No. 6 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1964), pp. 107109. For Osage women tanning skins, see Chapman, p. 105.
68
For an excellent discussion of the processing of nuts, see Paul S. Gardener, “The Ecological Structure and
Behavioral Implications of Mast Exploitation Strategies,” in Kristen J. Gremillion, ed., People, Plants, and
Landscapes: Studies in Paleoethnobotany (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1997), especially p.
165.
69
See Andrea A. Hunter and Deborah M Pearsall, “Paleoethnobotany of the Osage and Missouri Indians:
Analysis of Plant Remains from Historic Village Sites, “The Missouri Archaeologist, Vol. 47 (December 1986),
pp. 173 – 196, especially p. 184 and 194.
238
soft as chamois, pliant, reddish brown – could be folded and stacked into compact packs,
even the thicker, stiffer raw skins were transportable on horses. Trained horses could pick
their way along forest ridge trails. Osage may have utilized a network of old trade routes that
were themselves initially game trails. Deer, for instance, tend to return to the same areas in
winter, clustering in “yards” chosen for their shelter from wind and snow. The yarding of
deer would have created firm trails on the litter-packed forest floors. Horses would have
etched those trails even deeper. The onslaught of mounted Osage hunters pushed deer
populations farther west and north. After the 1790’s, the deerskin trade began a downswing,
brought on by overhunting.70 During the “prairie hegemony” of the Osage, however, the
horse and the deer combined in a twenty-year period of staggering deerskin extraction. One
historian has used the phrase “robber economy” to characterize the fur and peltry trade of the
Mississippi and Missouri lands.71
Across the river among the Illinois Indians, a robber economy in deerskin trade had been
possible only during the years when the woodlands of the floodplain and upland bluffs could
support herds of deer. Such herds had been described much earlier in the century as “vast”
and “roving.” While archaeological site studies of both the French and Indian villages have
consistently revealed the presence of deer bones, domesticated animal remains also appear, in
increasing numbers among the French and especially among the earliest Anglo-American
settlers in the 1790’s.72 Some limited evidence of the Illinois Indian trapping and hunting
harvests pinpoints the concentration more on furbearing mammals such as bobcat, bear, wolf,
70
James Taylor Carson, “Horses and the Economy,” p. 499.
Glenn T. Trewartha, “A Second Epoch,” p. 109.
72
Robert Mazrim, editor, “Now Quite Out of Society”: Archaeology and Frontier Illinois. Illinois
Transportation Archaeological Research Program Transportation Archaeological Bulletins No. 1 (UrbanaChampaign: University of Illinois, 2002), p. 151.
71
239
and fox, as well as otter, muskrat, mink, marten, and fisher.73 The enormous deerskin hauls
taking place across the river were not replicated in the Illinois Country after 1763. In 1769
Colonel Wilkins at Fort Chartres wrote [somewhat ambiguously] that “Peltries here are
abundant, but inferior to those of the Mississippi, the Major Part being Deer Skins.” He also
noted that the “Missouri is better peopled than the Mississippi.”74 Due to the remaining
French in the Illinois colonies ranging to the south and trading with the Indians there for deer
skins, Colonel Wilkins also felt “The Nation of the Illinois Indians with our French subjects
are jealous at the Cherokees and Chickasaws.”75 General Gage himself saw that the trade
potential of the Illinois was uncertain: “Some Trade has been carried on there, not very
great, and it is a doubt, whether the Adventurers in the Trade will not fail....”76
One reason was likely the deforestation of the Illinois. French occupied lands, since 1699,
had mandated a steady use of wood for heating and cooking; as with the Illinois Indians, the
preferred tree was hickory. While most accounts maintain that Illinois Indians constructed
traditional homes of bent saplings and woven cattail mats, one history does specify that in
1732, a tribe of Mechigamea built a “village of log cabins” near Fort Chartres.77 French
settlers preferred what has become known as French Creole architecture. Seventy years of
house and barn construction in which all property was surrounded by upright pickets and
posts had resulted in premium prices being paid for rot-resistant woods like red cedar. In St.
Genevieve by 1790, for instance, eastern red cedar, Juniperus virginiana, a prime post wood,
73
See, for instance, the itemized list of fur equivalents in Matthew Clarkson’s Diary, August 6, 1766 – August
16, 1767, in Clarence W. Alvord and Clarence Carter Carter, The New Regime, 1765 – 1767 (Springfield,
Illinois: Illinois State Historical Library, 1916), p. 361.
74
Wilkins to Barrington, December 5, 1769, in Alvord and Carter, Trade and Politics, p. 633.
75
Wilkins to Gage, January 2, 1769, in Alvord and Carter, Trade and Politics, p. 483.
76
Gage to Hillsborough, June 16, 1768, in Alvord and Carter, Trade and Politics, p. 317.
77
Glenn J. Speed, Ghost Towns of Southern Illinois (Royalton, Illinois: Glenn J. Speed, 1977), p. 172.
240
was selling for three times the amount of oak.78 Red cedar is the common native pioneer
tree of old fields and previously cleared or burned lands; it also furnishes food for deer who
browse it heavily in the winter months. (Some ecologists and botanists classify red cedar as a
native invasive species, so quickly does it seed and spread; however, in French Missouri and
Illinois, it wasn’t spreading quickly enough to keep up with the demand for cedar posts).
French builders also exploited another tree routinely. The shingle oak, Quercus imbricaria,
provided thousands – perhaps hundreds of thousands – of shingles for French houses. In
addition to using prairie cord grass as thatch, French carpenters employed the frow to split
the shingle oak into thin, overlapping sheets.79 A typical entry in the Chartres notarial
records, 1763, reads, “...one old house, built of pickets, covered with shingles, situate in New
Chartres near the Mississippi River....”80 A record from 1764 is even more precise in
detailing the number of wooden structures on the property: “...one horse mill built of
posts...one barn covered with straw [thatch]...one stable built of pickets, and the lot belonging
to said buildings, enclosed all around with posts...and the shingles, posts, and pickets which
are on said lot....”81 One of the earliest mentions of these “posts” occurs in a Kaskaskia
manuscript from 1723. A house built in Kaskaskia is described as having “Posts in the
ground, 30’ x 20’, floored, and with three doors and a gallerie.”82
In addition, repeated references in the notarial records to “hauling” wood in for
construction suggest that French workers were mining the oak stands on top of the bluffs,
especially, perhaps, white oak. While the French did not build the standard frontier log
78
Carl J. Ekberg, Colonial Ste. Genevieve: An Adventure on the Mississippi Frontier (Gerald, Missouri: The
Patrice Press, 1985), p. 286.
79
Native Tree Guide (Shaw Arboretum of the Missouri Botanical Garden, 1987), p. 5.
80
Brown and Dean, The Village of Chartres, Record K-330 (H496), p. 785.
81
Brown and Dean, The Village of Chartres, Record K-338 (H504), p. 800.
82
Cited in Jay D. Edwards, “The Origins of the Louisiana Creole Cottage,” French and Germans in the
Mississippi Valley: Landscape and Cultural Traditions, ed. by Michael Roark (Cape Girardeau, Missouri:
Center for Regional History and Cultural Heritage, 1988), p. 28.
241
cabin, preferring vertical-post construction in which “pickets” were placed in the ground or
embedded in a horizontal sill, log cabin construction provides a good measure of wood use.
A standard cabin “typically required about 80 logs in addition to the wood for the roof.”83
French notarial records of contracts for home construction are often specific that their homes
be built of walnut or oak. Observers of French homes up in the Prairie Du Chien area of
Wisconsin area also mention that the houses were wrapped in bark sheets – cedar, elm or
black ash – although this practice has not been documented for Illinois.84 Due to French
extraction of key tree species from upland groves, by the 1780’s, arriving Anglo-American
settlers on the ridge prairies may have been resorting to using woodlots (stream margin
timber) at a distance from their farms. Finally, soil analysis from the northern American
Bottom, including an alluvial fan between the Cahokia Mounds and the bluffs, has revealed a
“zone of laminated sediments.” These soils show what is termed a “renewed instability” that
began with “forest clearance activities in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.”85
Across the Mississippi, miles of forest, a blend of deciduous and conifer, coated the
unglaciated southern Missouri hills. The lush trees of the Missouri Ozark lands, dominated
by an oak-hickory overstory raining down delectable acorns for deer, likely had no parallel
by the 1770’s in the Illinois. And in some areas, those miles of forest contained superlative
stands of pure oak. Studies conducted in the early twentieth century still found that “the
upland forests are composed almost exclusively of oaks, constituting one of the largest areas
of oak forest and one of the least mixed stands of oak to be found in the country.” The same
83
Gordon G. Whitney, From Coastal Wilderness, p. 146.
Mary Antoine de Julio, “Prairie Du Chien and the Rediscovery of Its French Log Houses,” French and
Germans in the Mississippi Valley, p. 101. Descriptions of the earliest American cabins on the upland, however,
mention the use of basswood bark (linden tree) as an indoor insulation, along with “pelts of raccoon, opossum,
and wolf.” See History of St. Clair County, pp. 56 – 57.
85
William I. Woods, “Population nucleation, intensive agriculture, and environmental degradation: The
Cahokia example,” Agriculture and Human Values 21 (Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2004), p.
155.
84
242
study found an “extraordinary number of species” of oak.86 The presence of unusually
concentrated oak varieties in the Missouri may well have contributed to its deer population.
Surveys of white tail deer diet in timbered regions of America have found that as much as
one third of deer diet in the fall is acorns. The high fat and carbohydrate content of acorns
rapidly builds up deer reserves for the winter. In times of “acorn abundance,” deer may eat so
many acorns that the mast comprises “close to 80%” of their diet.87 Scientists who have used
Government Land Office records (the GLO survey) to reconstruct the “presettlement
floodplain landscape”along the Illinois and Mississippi rivers have found that perhaps 56%
of the floodplain was forested; however, those records, drawn from the selection of witness
trees by surveyors, were set down in the decades following 1800. At that time, the
abandonment of French Illinois had begun to be reversed by the influx of American settlers.
Forty years of untended tree growth on the floodplain and uplands would have seen the
beginnings of successional resurgence of woodland. By the 1780’s, the prairies and cut over
timber were only beginning a recovery process.88 In addition, this succession would not
involve a resurgence of slow-growing, fire-resistant oaks. A study of forest regeneration in
southern Illinois, using the same interval – approximately 43 years of abandoned lands –
established that the first pioneers into old, burned and cleared fields were sweetgum and
sugar maple.89
The southern tip forests of Illinois, the swampy cypress country north of the Ohio River as
well as the wide swath of hardwood known today as Shawnee National Forest, were far
86
See Carl O. Sauer, The Geography, pp. 58-59.
See “White-Tailed Deer: Seasonal Use of Forage Classes” in Studies of the Cross Timbers Region of
Oklahoma and Texas: http://www.noble.org/Ag/wildlife/DeerFoods/habitatReq4.html
88
See John C. Nelson, Anjela Redmond, and Richard E. Sparks, “Impacts of Settlement on Floodplain
Vegetation at the Confluence of the Illinois and Mississippi Rivers, Transactions of the Illinois State Academy
of Science, Vol. 87 (3) and (4), 1994.
89
See William Ashby and George T. Weaver, “Forest Regeneration on Two Fields in Southwestern Illinois,”
American Midland Naturalist Vol. 84 (1), July, 1970, pp. 90 – 104.
87
243
enough away from the Illinois Indian villages to make aggressive deer hunting impractical.
Researchers attempting to pinpoint the hunting grounds of the Illinois during the British
period have located the Kaskaskia “...out upon a Prairie hunting about one hundred Miles
from the village of Kaskaskia.” The historian compiling these records comments that during
the winter of 1770-71, at least, the Illinois were hunting “at too great a distance from Fort
Chartres to make trading visits.”90 There is also evidence that the Kaskaskia occasionally
hunted across the Mississippi. An entry in the logs of Baynton, Wharton, and Morgan records
the Kaskaskia as receiving presents at Fort Chartres: “They begged, that as they had brought
a Considerable Share of their Trade to this Side, they might receive Sincere Marks of our
Friendship for them.”91 Early in Colonel Wilkins’ tenure at Fort Chartres, in 1769, his
journal of transactions with Indians shows interactions “almost exclusively” with the four
Illinois Indian groups, who came “regularly” to trade and receive the small gifts by which the
old Indian traditions of gifting and honoring were meagerly maintained.92 The Wilkins log,
and other, scattered references in the correspondence of the British in the Illinois Country,
compile a picture of the Illinois tribes continuing to use the central magnet of Fort Chartres
as their base. The “out and back” movement of their hunts and their regular appearance at
the great limestone gates suggest that the British storehouse and Indian trade policies were
gradually replacing the familiar French liaisons, despite the Indians’ initial resistance.
Colonel Wilkins wrote grandiose estimates to General Gage of what might be possible in
trade revenues from the Illinois. He felt that the upper Illinois River country was too
uninhabited by Indians to bring in much trade, but that if motivated, the Peoria, Kaskaskia,
90
Joseph Jablow, Indians, p. 273.
Cited in Joseph Jablow, Indians of Illinois and Indiana, p. 264.
92
Jablow, p. 267.
91
244
and Cahokia “might furnish 3 or 400 packs P[er] Annum.”93 It is not clear what peltries or
skins would comprise these packs. To place the number of 3-400 packs in perspective, one
observer of the deerskin trade to the south, in Augusta, Georgia, between 1783 and 1799, felt
that the export “has never been less than 240,000 skins.” In the first decade of the nineteenth
century, Choctaw and Chickasaw nations alone sent 105,039 pounds of deerskins to New
Orleans.94 Deerskins probably averaged about one and half pounds each, and typical
packhorse loads were 150 to 200 pounds.95 Colonel Wilkins’ estimate for the Illinois was
therefore an improbable 40,000 pounds of skins! Across the river in Missouri, the Osage
were increasing their deerskin packloads to a high of 22,000 pounds per year. It seems clear
that the Illinois Indians were not competing in the deerskin trade. The oak-hickory
woodlands were likely compromised; and there were no dense miles of sheltering woods for
horse thieves to fade into with contraband animals. A few tribes had stolen horses from the
garrison of Fort Chartres in the first year of British occupation, but they returned the animals
during a negotiation with George Croghan in 1766.96 The traditional location of floodplain
Illinois Indian villages placed the Indians between two populations: the burgeoning
European settlements across the Mississippi, and the Ohio Valley and Wabash River tribes
criss-crossing the prairies to the east. In the late eighteenth century, these Indians were
caught in the peculiar nature of their land: not prairie enough to promote the rapid
replenishing of buffalo herds; not canopied forest enough to maintain the forest-meadow
93
Report by Colonel Wilkins, December, 1769, cited in Jablow, Indians of Illinois and Indiana, p. 267.
Charles E. Hanson, Jr. “The Southern Trade: A Slightly Different Story,” The Museum of the Fur Trade
Quarterly, Vol. 221(1), 1986, p. 3. For a good general overview of the southern deerskin trade, see Daniel H.
Usner, “The deerskin trade in French Louisiana,” Proceedings of the Meeting of the French Colonial Historical
Society, Vol. 10, 1984, pp. 75-93.
95
Charles E, Hanson, Jr., “The Southern Trade,” pp. 2-3.
96
Croghan to Johnson, September 10, 1766, in Alvord and Carter, The New Regime, p. 374.
94
245
mosaic preferred by white tails; and finally, ribboned by so many waterways that humans
were almost ubiquitous by 1770.
Other tribes emulated the patterns of trade modeled by the Osage, of engaging in legal
activities close to the monitoring eye of the Spanish authorities in the settlements and trading
on the instant with any opportunistic individual in the interior. During the decades of the
1760’s and 1770’s, for instance, the Missouri Indian tribe “became familiar,” and “had got in
the habit of spending their summers with the French.” The (greatly-reduced) Missouri
camped outside St. Louis where Missouri women found work in the building and
construction trades of the new settlement.97 This “custom,” of Indian tribes migrating to the
St. Louis area to camp and trade, began to pull in the more aggressive, northwestern tribes as
well. Eventually even the Sacs [Sauk] and the Fox used the market center of St. Louis to
“trade away their maple-sugar, their pecans, etc.”98 This riverine activity was developing
directly across the Mississippi River from British Illinois, reflecting a commercial,
population, and resource shift to a dynamic new center. The effect on the Indian populations
of the true Illinois Country was to increase their dissatisfaction with British rule, heighten
their anxiety about their livelihood and future, and create a different kind of traffic around
Fort Chartres: purveyors of furs also became purveyors of information. Tribal “unrest” and
potential inter-tribal war are the dominant themes of the British occupation of the Illinois.
One early historian of the St. Louis area asserts that the Illinois Indians “never crossed the
river.”99 While this is a generalization and clearly erroneous, as some Peoria especially did
“cross the river” to establish a permanent camp south of St. Louis, the perception that the
97
This description of the coming and goings of tribes around St. Louis is taken from Joseph N. Nicollet,
“Sketch of the Early History of St. Louis,” p. 146.
98
Ibid.
99
Joseph N. Nicollet, “Sketch of the Early History,” p. 146.
246
trade life of the Illinois Country was vitalized through the Missouri Indian tribes and not the
Illinois is likely accurate. By January of 1769, French merchants living in Spanish St. Louis
had presented a “Petition of the Merchants of St. Louis to Captain Rui to be Allowed to
Trade on the Missouri.”100 The merchants state that they “also have presented the same
memorials to Monsieur Saint Ange in regard to what concerns the district of the Misisipi,
where it is absolutely necessary to send traders for the tranquillity of the tribes….”101
Merchants perceived Indians as competitors for European trade. With St. Louis merchants
beginning to send traders both east and west, the sixty-mile stretch of Mississippi River to
which the French had come marveling in 1699 was probably never again empty of craft,
flowing wide and open, glinting with undisturbed light. And on this tide of human expansion
spread all too easily a mixture of true, false, and hyperbolic news.
100
See this document in Louis Houck, The Spanish Regime in Missouri, Volume One (Chicago, Illinois: R.R.
Donnelly & Sons Company, 1909), p. 37.
101
“Petition of the Merchants,” in Louis Houck, The Spanish Regime, p. 38.
247
Land of Rumor: British, French, and Indian Illinois, 1765 – 1778
Across the early 1770’s, relations among indigenous Indians, visiting and raiding tribes,
old French families, and British military and merchants can be glimpsed as authentic and
human. The record is neither one of constant friction nor harmonious prosperity but a
mixture. Especially by the early 1770’s, there were signs that some British living near Fort
Chartres were finding life in the Illinois worth planning a future around. Brief mention in
some accounts and letters concerning the Kaskaskia and Mechigamea “who are our friends”
indicates that the pejorative dismissals of the Illinois subtribes found in all initial British
accounts were being tempered by proximity. Yet the ten years of British occupancy saw
increasing pressures on the old French settlements by dissatisfied tribes to the north and
south. The impact of Pontiac’s War lasted through the early 1770’s as anti-British tribes
blamed the Illinois not only for learning to live in peaceful adjacency with the British but
also for the murder of Pontiac in 1769. The years of British sojourn were filled with gossip,
talk, and rumor about incipient events and upriver and downriver news.
Yet it would be a mistake to analyze the unrest in the Illinois Country only from a
political standpoint. Underlying the sporadic violence – the attacks on French and British
traders, random raids on settlements – can be found a story of disintegrating livelihoods.
While the overall argument of this study has emphasized the ecological shifts engendered
through French-Indian interaction across eighty years, not all human privations can be laid at
the door of environmental degradation. The erosion of ancient subsistence patterns, patterns
which yielded dependable harvests through labor-intensive activity, is also part of the story.
During the British years in the Illinois, the disruptive presence of the Potawatomi (and raids
248
by the St. Joseph Potawatomi especially) became much more pronounced. These Indians had
once lived in a broad loop extending from southern Wisconsin around the tip of Lake
Michigan and on up into the Great Lakes Country. In that area, they were harvesters of wild
rice. A curious lacunae in any accounts of early Illinois – French, British, or American – is
mention of this rich, sustaining grain. British at Fort Chartres, in fact, ate rice shipped up
from New Orleans, white, polished rice from the Carolinas or the bayou lowlands of
Louisiana.
In his study of the Potawatomi, R. David Edmunds points out that Potawatomi women
particularly harvested wild rice as part of their traditional food supply.1 Early
anthropological studies of Great Lakes Indians mention two centers of rice harvesting
activity, one along the southern shores of Lake Superior and one in the Fox River Valley.
This area is in northern Illinois and today runs north-south across the Wisconsin state line.
There, “Menomini, Potawatomi, Sauk and Fox, Mascoutin, Miami, and Kikapu” harvested
Zizania aquatica. The late nineteenth-century anthropologist who studied the history of
these tribes felt “undoubtedly the prime cause of the location of Indian villages was the great
crop of wild rice to be obtained in each place....”2 Parts of the Fox River were so densely
choked with wild rice that “passages for boats had to be cut through it.” This grain, also
called Indian, water, wild oats, and marsh rye, played multiple roles in Indian subsistence.
Wild rice attracted “vast numbers of water fowl,” and in addition, because of the height of
1
See Edmunds, The Potawatomis: Keepers of the Fire (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1978). H.
Clyde Wilson, “A New Interpretation of the Wild Rice District of Wisconsin,” disagrees that Potawatomi were
rice harvesters, but his evidence is taken almost wholly from the early Jesuit Relations. See his analysis in
American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 58 (6), December, 1956, pp. 1059 – 1064.
2
See Gardener P. Stickney, “Indian Use of Wild Rice,” American Anthropologist, Vol. IX (4), April, 1986, p.
155-122. See page 121 for quotes above.
249
the stalks, sometimes nine or ten feet, rice also served as a ready-made blind for waterfowl
hunters.3
Zizania aquatica did not disappear from the northern Illinois country until the twentieth
century. An 1870 survey of Lake and McHenry Counties, for example, found “The larger
lakes, in many instances, are themselves widely margined with a growth of wild rice....” In
1875, an observer near the Chain of Lakes district of Illinois saw “Wild rice from four to
twelve feet high.” Naturalists and botanists have “mapped wild rice in a total of eight of the
11 counties in the Fox valley,” and although rice was later seriously impacted by drainage
projects, carp foraging, and water pollution, it was still abundant and available to Indian
tribes in Illinois in the eighteenth century.4
Since Spanish records of gifts and provisions distributed to Indian tribes appearing in
Spanish St. Louis do mention the Potawatomi, questions can be asked about tribes willing to
travel fair distances and ford large rivers to obtain food. The abandonment of rice harvesting
occurred in the context of an intensely accelerating market economy in skins and peltries. In
the Canadian north, among the Ojibway, wild rice had been traded to French fur traders for
well over one hundred years. After peltries, Zizania aquatica was “the most desired item” in
the northern fur trade. Although subject to changing value, due to the fluctuations in rice
harvests, a bushel of folle avoine, wild rice, equaled a mature beaver pelt in value.5 The
history of Indian tribes living in Illinois reveals that while environmental change did exert
both discrete and keen pressures on Indians, and while competition for natural resources may
3
Gardener P. Stickney, “Indian Use,” p. 115 – 120.
These descriptive accounts are taken from John White, Early Accounts of the Ecology of the Fox River Area
(Springfield, Illinois: Illinois Department of Natural Resources, 2000), p. 27.
5
Gilbert Quaal, Wild Plant Uses (Both Past and Present) (Deer River, Minnesota: White Oak Society, 1995),
pp. 26 and 5. See also mention of both Fox and Potawatomi as rice harvesters in Thomas Vennum, Jr., Wild
Rice and the Ojibway People (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1988).
4
250
have driven inter-tribal warfare prehistorically and historically, in some cases, Indian nations
had let go of reliable survival mechanisms. Wild rice, however, is dependent on precise
environmental factors. If heavy spring flooding occurs, not enough oxygen will reach the
seeds to promote germination.6 Although little evidence is available for eighteenth-century
rice growth on the Fox River, a suggestive point concerns the building of mills there. The
Fox River was, in fact, “the most dammed stream in Illinois.” These earliest dams, some
perhaps in place by the late 1780’s, were constructed of brush, earth, logs and stones; their
number may have changed the water levels on the Fox, impacting rice.7 When looking for
explanations for the marked shifts in Indian lifeways, such as those especially evident in the
splintered Potawatomi, both environmental change and external economic stimuli (market
economy) have worked together. Richard White has poignantly characterized such shifts with
the phrase, “the roots of dependency.”8
On one level, a theme of the last ten years of this study – which saw the most interaction
among disparate peoples – is food procurement. The British at Fort Chartres were laying
stores by; the French were peddling foodstuffs to the garrison and to Indians, and vice versa;
Indians were also traveling to Spanish forts to obtain food; Fox and Potawatomi raiders were
attacking French and British hunters anywhere they found them on the Grand Prairie; and the
river systems were being used at night to carry on an extensive illicit trade. Captain Forbes
detailed this practice back in 1768, when he wrote to General Gage, “...the Subjects on our
side may send Peltry over the River in the Night, and have French goods in return. The
6
See Wild Rice, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Department of the Interior, September, 1987, n. p.
John White, Early Accounts of the Ecology of the Fox River Area, p. 23.
8
See Richard White, The Roots of Dependency: subsistence, environment, and social change among the
Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos (Omaha: University of Nebraska Press, 1983).
7
251
reason for this contraband trade is, that the French Goods are 30 p’Cent cheaper....”9 The use
of the Illinois rivers by French traders continued to be seen as an outrage by the British.
Colonel Wilkins wrote to the British Secretary of War, “...the French still carry away all the
Trade...they go up our rivers....”10 The final chapter of the Illinois in the years before the
Americans arrived describes the behavior of peoples in extreme transition. The British had
just begun to put down tenuous roots when the American Revolution broke out. Against the
backdrop of yet another war, the Illinois Country continued to be exploited by many peoples
– and in some cases, animals – looking for any means to survive. Such a reality must be
placed next to the tenacious refrain in all early Illinois histories – one that has subtly
influenced even later historians: “[In 1796] the [Illinois] country was in a state of almost
primeval simplicity.”11
Three years after the British first wintered in the Illinois, meagerly parceling out their
scant provisions, hunting in a desultory way, buying random items of foodstuffs from the
remaining French, the memory of “starving” was still fresh. George Morgan, the
representative of the Philadelphia merchant firm Wharton, Baynton, and Morgan, made sure
he was set for the winter of 1768:
However there will be no Danger of Starving for I have now two Years
Provisions in the House consisting of Salt Petred Gammons, Rounds of
Beef, Buffaloe Tongues, Vennison & Bears Hams...So that I am not in
Quite the Same Situation that poor honest Jennings Used to be formerly –
When his Letters were fill’d with his Fears of Starving &c.12
9
“Information on the State of Commerce in the Illinois Country given by Captain Forbes 34th Regiment,”
enclosed in a January 6, 1769 letter to General Gage, in Clarence Alvord and Clarence Carter, Trade and
Politics 1767 – 1769 (Springfield, Illinois: Illinois State Historical Library, 1921), p. 382.
10
Wilkins to Barrington, Secretary of War, December 5, 1769, in Alvord and Carter, Trade and Politics, p. 632.
11
Arthur Clinton Boggess, The Settlement of Illinois, 1778 –1830 (Chicago: Chicago Historical Society,
Collection No. 5, 1908), p. 13.
12
George Morgan to his wife, after Sept. 5, 1768, in Alvord and Carter, Trade and Politics, pp. 480 – 481.
252
In addition to the above list of smoked and salt petered meats, Morgan had eleven nesting
hens “with 13 Eggs each” and more than two hundred couples of pigeons in a “Pidgeon
House built in the Shape of Parson Smiths Folly.” He owned six cows and had put in fifteen
acres of Indian Corn “& expect to have fifty if no Accidents happens to my Horses or
Oxen.”13 While working at Fort Chartres, Morgan was still able to build up what he referred
to as his “plantation.” He had constructed a small log house and hired a “New England Man”
to build a new barn, stables, and fences. His “negroe Boy” cooked a dish of rice pudding
almost daily; Morgan had grown quite fond of this, taking it with a glass of wine. While
enjoying such commodities as rice and Madeira shipped up from New Orleans, Morgan was
clearly putting in his acres of corn on pre-worked and plowed French farmland available
around the fort (he mentions no ground-breaking activity); he and his helper could easily sow
the long ribbon arpents formerly belonging to the French of the village of Chartres. His
animals were likely initially housed in the solid French barns, built of sassafras or oak, and
pastured in the fenced common grounds. When he was not caring for his stock or hanging up
venison and bear haunches in French smokehouses, Morgan walked to the fort. There, every
day, he received an uneven flow of peltries from Indians and French traders and dispensed in
return a wide variety of goods. He kept track of what passed from hand to hand. In July of
1768 he told his partners, “The Red Strouds, Kettles, Wire, and Guns I must have...of the
following Tin Ware you cannot easily send too much – Nests of Kettles, Milk & Pudding
Pans sorted small, Candle Sticks – Brass Iron & Tin...Pewter Basons.” He was also begging
for shipments of shoes. “I have not now a single Pair of Mens or Womens Shoes left...the
Demand for them is very excessive.”14 Earlier in the spring, the Fort Chartres commissary
13
14
Ibid., p. 481 – 482.
George Morgan to Baynton and Wharton, July 20, 1768, in Trade and Politics, pp. 359 – 361.
253
Edward Cole had documented a brisk trade in Breech Clouts. Coats, petticoats, match coats,
shirts, “gartering,” Indian ribbon, and Leggings were also sold daily.15
Patterns of consumption and especially, the escalating demand for clothing items, suggest
that Indian, French and British peoples were all depending on the storehouse. Although the
British occupied Illinois for only ten years, they were there long enough to experience
resistance, acceptance, and even a measure of prosperous engagement among the interactions
of diverse peoples of the Illinois. This tenuously-growing social world of trade relationships
would be dissolved through invasions of northern Indians whose relationships to the British
and to the tribes of the Illinois Confederacy had been permanently changed by Pontiac’s
War. The gathering momentum of the American colonial revolt was also a factor in the
unrest of the 1770’s. Age-old hostilities and newly-engendered ones prevented a frontier
synthesis of peoples and cultures. For George Morgan in 1768, however, the future looked
promising, exemplified in his own storehouse of foodstuffs.
In the great central yard of Fort Chartres, on any given day that summer, would be found
traders’ horses strapped with merchandise, Indian horses piled with packs of peltries, and
hunters’ horses returning weighted with huge, darkly-stained leather bags. Following spotty
trails of blood, dogs skulked along the chalk-white walls, darting out among groups of
French formed into militia and drilling under British command, black slaves sent on errands
to the fort, Indians on foot or arriving on glistening, dripping horses, as when the Osage
crossed the Mississippi in “a large party of warriors.”16 In the high heat and humidity of the
August floodplain, British soldiers’ wives originally from Yorkshire or Providence toiled in
15
16
See Account of Philadelphia Merchants in Trade and Politics, pp. 391 – 408.
Account of Philadelphia Merchants, p. 406.
254
from their houses in the former French village of Chartres.17 They would likely have met
French women from Prairie du Rocher, comfortably peddling garden produce, long used to
the heavy, saturated air and immune to the “miasmic” diseases that were plaguing British
arrivals. The empty country to which Captain Stirling had come three years ago, occupying a
fort overgrown with weeds and filthy from neglect, was re-establishing itself. The many
letters sent out from Fort Chartres by British men writing their wives as well as commissary
and military correspondence sketch a busy world. Despite General Gage’s dim view of the
potential of the Illinois, in the year 1768, the human traffic there was considerable.
The British in the Illinois Country most aware of trade and hunting patterns were
merchants. Although British military commanded at Fort Chartres, it was the merchant firm
representative and the commissary, the keeper of storehouse goods, that Indians most often
sought. On a day to day basis, these men became skilled assessors of the number and quality
of furs passing through the gates of the fort. They recognized and knew personally a great
number of Indians, members of diverse tribes who converged from all four directions. It is in
the letters of merchants and their representatives that Indians are most often named as
individuals. In his diary, Matthew Clarkson wrote on December 23, 1766: “Another party of
Osages came to the fort, about fifteen in number. Tawanaheh the chief. Shakewah, an old
man who interpreted into the Illinois language. Saheshinga, another Indian.”18 British
military correspondence rarely names individual Indians unless they were chiefs, but the
commercial men in British Illinois traded with individual people. After only a year or two or
living out at Fort Chartres, some British writers often identified Indians. Because so many
17
George Morgan mentions, for instance, that his “New England man” hoped to send for his wife back in
Providence. See George Morgan’s letter to his wife in Trade and Politics, pp. 480-481.
18
“Clarkson’s Diary, August 6, 1766 – April 16, 1767,” in Clarence Alvord and Clarence Carter, The New
Regime 1765 – 1767 (Springfield, Illinois: Illinois State Historical Library, 1916), p. 359.
255
French of the riverine settlements were illiterate, they left scant accounts and letters of their
daily lives. Yet over the course of the sixty-six year French and Indian history there, how
many Mechigamea, Cahokia, and Peoria could have entered the historical record as named
people? The fleeting proper names in British letters provide some of the only recognition of
Indians as named persons – tribal members who may not have had status as chiefs.19 Among
these Indians visiting Fort Chartres it is likely there was an increasing number of mixed
blood men and women. The British acknowledged this to some extent. General Haldimand
wrote to General Gage in 1770, “If any French do come to us, it will be from the Illinois
where they are half-Indians....”20 Yet it was commercial men who had the most intimate
dealings with Indians; they admitted the realities of Indian - French trade loyalties and the
deep, decades-old ties Illinois Indians especially had to French families.21 In 1767, Baynton
and Wharton were writing to Lauchlin Macleane, Lord Shelburne’s private secretary, about
the state of affairs in the Illinois. “The Influence of the French is so great, with the Numerous
Tribes of Indians, in the Country, That They have engrossed the greatest Part of the Trade
and Thereby, France is enabled to interfere with the British Nation....” In the same letter, the
merchants inform Macleane, “with the utmost Concern...That the greatest Discontent and
Jealousy, Now prevail Among the Western Nations.” The merchants had “certain
19
More Kaskaskia Indians are identified through the French regime than any other group. The Rouensa family
had early been important in helping Kaskaskia Indians to accept Catholicism. Later, members of the French
Canadian Ducoigne and Rouensa families married and produced an important metis chief named Jean Baptiste
Ducoigne. See Robert M. Owens, “Jean Baptiste Ducoigne, the Kaskaskias, and the Limits of Thomas
Jefferson’s Friendship,” Journal of Illinois History Vol. 5, No. 2 (Summer, 2002), p. 112.
20
Haldimand to Gage, May 16, 1770, British Museum Additional Manuscripts 21664:148 and 21665:289,
Photostats at the Illinois Historical Survey.
21
For a good study of the way the fur trade post or fort functioned as a social institution in a mixed-blood
community, see Gary Clayton Anderson, Kinsmen of Another Kind: Dakota-White Relations in the Upper
Missouri Valley 1650 –1862 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984). For the earliest sound appraisal
along these lines, see Frederick Jackson Turner, The Character and Influence of the Indian Trade in Wisconsin:
A Study of the Trading Post as an Institution, ed. by David Harry Miller and William W. Savage, Jr. (Norman:
University of Oklahoma, Press, 1977), originally published in 1891. Turner concludes, “The history of
commerce is the history of the intercommunication of peoples.” See p. 85.
256
Intelligence” concerning twelve tribes meeting at the “Shawanese Town.” There they would
“determine On Measures, To do Themselves Justice, for Injurys They have received, from
the Kings Subjects.”22
Tracing the origins of such reports, of the “intelligence” making its way to Fort Chartres,
is often impossible. British writers only sometimes identify the source of their information.
By its frequency, however, and given that the Illinois Indians were the tribes most
consistently at the fort, an inference can be made about sources. In 1768, the commissary at
Fort Chartres, Edward Cole, wrote a lengthy “Account of Philadelphia Merchants.” Some of
this manuscript has unfortunately been burned, but partial entries indicate that Cole and
Captain Gordon Forbes were attempting to track down sources of rumor. In listing the
merchandise dispersed as gifts to various Indian tribes, Cole writes, “To Two Partys of the
Vermillion and Kaskaskia Indians, who came [MS. Burned] the Black Fly, in Consequence
of a Message sent to them by me to [inquire] into the Truth of a report which was spread
abroad that they had rec[eived] a Belt to Strike their Fathers the English.”23 The merchant
report in its entirety is an invaluable reflection of the numbers and nations of Indians who
came to the fort to impart information and receive gifts. “Piorias,” “Missouris,” “Kaskaskias
and other Indians living at and around [MS. Burned]” “Piorias at Pain Court [St. Louis],”
“the Chief of the Osage,” “Seven Chiefs of the Putawatomies,” “a Chief of the Arcanzas,”
“Pondiac and His Attendants,” as well as “Sundry Chiefs and Partys of Ottaways and
Chippaways” – all passed under the limestone arch of Fort Chartres, and Edward Cole
dispersed appreciative gifts to the amount of six hundred one pounds, ten shillings.24 From
22
Baynton and Wharton to Macleane, October 9, 1767, in Trade and Politics, pp. 84-85.
See the Account of Philadelphia Merchants in Alvord and Carter, Trade and Politics, p. 405.
24
Account of the Philadelphia Merchants, p. 408. In his study of the British in the Illinois, Clarence Carter
provides the figure of “more than six thousand pounds sterling” for the “Indian expense alone” at Fort Chartres
23
257
the Osage west across the Mississippi, the Arkansas nations to the south, the Potawatomis
and Chippewa to the north, and Pontiac from the northeast – tribes converged on a fort
slipping slowly into a bend of a giant river. All peoples arriving at the fort would have seen
and heard the Mississippi and a good many would have been on it or in it. In addition to the
horse traffic, there would have been many river craft gently bobbing along the shoreline:
hollowed-out pirogues of cottonwood, lighter bark canoes, cane rafts, and rough log ferries.
The Illinois tribes living closest to the fort, the Mechigamea (and sometimes the Cahokia and
Peoria) would have taken footpaths to the gates. Edward Cole and the military commander,
Captain Forbes, extracted promises of trade fidelity from all these arriving Indian nations.
Especially vocal about wanting to support the English in the burgeoning competition were
the Osage, who were already pushing south to the Arkansas River to reach unlicensed French
and Spanish traders. A year later, in 1768, General Gage wrote a frustrated account, a
“Complaint of the Settlers and Traders from the Spanish Side of the Mississippi, who go up
the Rivers Ilinois, Ohio, and Oubache, to Trade with the Indians in His Majesty’s Territorys,
and to hunt upon their Lands.” Gage believed these “Spanish side” traders – who were just
as likely to have been French as Spanish – encouraged “Mischief” as well as illicit trade,
desiring the Indians to “keep their Hatchets ready to strike.”25
The belief that contraband traders were also war mongers is clear in British
correspondence. French and Spanish traders were thought to act with the design of an
international conspiracy, agents in a vast trade war brewing in all directions. Yet the British
themselves were key participants in such intrigues. Colonel Wilkins, for instance, on his
arrival in the Illinois in 1768, likely sent “a Gentleman to be depended on” over to scout out
between September 1766 and September 1767. See Carter, Great Britain and the Illinois Country 1763 – 1774
(Freeport, New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1971 (1910)), p. 95.
25
Gage to Shelburne, April 24, 1768, in Alvord and Carter, Trade and Politics, p. 267.
258
the Spanish fort being built at the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri. “This
Gentleman was so curious as to measure the Fort several times.” Those specific
measurements are included in the letter sent to General Gage, as well as exact counts of the
numbers of Spanish soldiers stationed at the fort.26 Probably Illinois Indians crossing into
Missouri lands, such as the Peoria who occasionally hunted there, also provided the British in
the Illinois with information about the Spanish trade. Yet it was the French who continued to
interact most often with the Illinois. The English language was heard consistently for the first
time in the Illinois Country during the Seven Years War. French had been spoken there
since 1699 and had become the language of trade, a Creole patois containing a vibrant blend
of native vocabulary, old French Canadian, and place names arising from joint usage of the
land. Many Illinois Indians understood it, and in return, quite a few French could speak
some Algonquian. In May of 1768, Peoria Indians reported to a Frenchman in “Caho”
(Cahokia) that Potawatomi Indians were plotting against the British. “They immediately
gave intelligence to...Monsieur Longvall, who could speak their language.”27
In maintaining trade and affective loyalties to the French under British rule, the Illinois
Indians were able to influence the course of occupation even before some expeditions arrived
in the Mississippi bottomlands. One of the early signs was the downriver flow of ominous
tidings about how Indians would receive the first British to arrive in their country. In 1765,
while Major Farmar was organizing his expedition to relieve Captain Stirling up at Fort
Chartres, he was plagued with desertions of his troops. Down the long, populated stretch of
the Mississippi to New Orleans ran accounts, canoe to village, village to pirogue, pirogue to
sandbar camp, of the angry native inhabitants of the Illinois Country, resentful of the
26
27
Wilkins to Gage, September 13, 1768, in Alvord and Carter, Trade and Politics, pp. 388-389.
Jennings Journal, May 5 – May 10, 1768, in Trade and Politics, p. 275.
259
incoming British and ready to ambush the soldiers of His Britannic Majesty. In 1764, the last
French governor, D’Abbadie, wrote of the Illinois Country, “The news which M. de Villiers
sends me is very disquieting to him: the savages are visiting him in companies of twenty and
thirty, and it is necessary that he give them something or run the risk of their threats.”28 Yet
a year before, in 1763, the British at Fort Detroit complained that “these Indians by
abandoning this country make it scarce worth our possessing for the Multiplicity of Animals
in these parts makes it a most valuable mine and you know they are best calculated for
working it.”29 References in the correspondence of the French and the British, prior to their
final occupation of the Illinois, reflect this peculiar theme: the absence of Indians, both as fur
providers and as suppliers of provisions, but also, paradoxically, their continued threat. By
February of 1765 the Minister at New Orleans was receiving letters such as this one: “M. St.
Ange informs me...that if there is not sent to him some prompt succor from New Orleans, his
feeble garrison and the inhabitants of the Illinois will be exposed to the furor of the savages,
who, driven to desperation because they are abandoned and because they are given nothing,
would be capable of proceeding to the most terrible extremities.”30
The (potential) “furor of the savages” was likely perceived by the common British foot
soldiers stationed in New Orleans as equal to the ferocity of Indians in the Ohio Valley
during the Seven Years War. British Indian captives who lived to tell of Indian treatment of
prisoners spread gruesome accounts. For instance, although captured early, in 1755, Colonel
James Smith watched as a dozen injured prisoners were burned at the stake beside the
Allegheny River. In the same year, Mary Jemison, captured at 13, saw “heads, arms, legs,
28
Journal of D’Abbadie, February, 1764, in Clarence Alvord, The Critical Period 1763 – 1765 (Springfield,
Illinois: Illinois State Historical Library, 1915), pp. 170 – 171.
29
Montressor to Bassett, November 2, 1763, Detroit, in Clarence Alvord, The Critical Period, p. 535.
30
Aubry to the Minister of New Orleans, February 4, 1765, in Alvord, The Critical Period, p. 434.
260
and other fragments of the bodies of some white people who had just been burned.” She
recounted that it “was like pork...hanging on a pole.”31 By the time the British arrived in
New Orleans and sat waiting for the provisioning of their transport, these stories would have
been circulating for at least ten years. In 1769 the French priest Father Gibault wrote to his
superior in Quebec, justifying his being armed “with my gun and two pistols.” Father
Gibault is credited with a romantic imagination by his biographers, but he was drawing on
history when he wrote of fending off an attack by an Indian, “...a miserable barbarian who
seeks only to gratify his barbarism, who only wants my scalp, who would as soon take my
hair as that of my horse, or who would slowly burn me alive just for the pleasure of seeing
me suffer, who would make me eat my own flesh after having roasted some part of my
body....”32 Gibault feared ambush by fierce Indians of the Grand Prairie, such as the
Kickapoo or the Miami.
The truth of the Illinois Country, however, was that except for the foiled plot of 1752, in
which Miami Indians and a few Kaskaskias fired on some French villagers, no Illinois Indian
tribe had ever directly attacked the French villages, the fort, or Frenchmen in their fields
(ambush by the Fox was common earlier in the century). The “furor of the savages” was a
haunting invocation of other times and places, other Indian-European frontiers. Conflation of
Indian practices – merging the Ohio and Mississippi Valley Indians as similar populations –
seems to have been likely. Major Farmar and his officers wrote in a memorial that it was
necessary to “...find some means to prevent all desertions in the future.” Farmar blamed the
proximity of New Orleans for desertions, calling it an “asylum...where [deserters] find
31
These examples appear in John A. Jakle, Images of the Ohio Valley: A Historical Geography of Travel, 1740
– 1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 74.
32
Gibault to Briand, October, 1769, in Trade and Politics, p. 622.
261
encouragement from ill-disposed people....”33 Even after the occupation of the Illinois,
British soldiers often deserted. In 1768, General Gage was still noting that 41 deserters from
“Louisiana” had been sent to “the Grenadoes.”34 Earlier, in 1765, Major Fraser wrote to
General Gage about the reception of his men up in the Illinois Country: “My men...were
very ill-treated every Day by such Indians as were Drunk, and were destitute of Clothing,
etc.” Likely fearing worse to follow the “ill treatment,” Fraser sent his men away while the
Indians “were at a Council at Fort Chartres.”35
That ambiguous adverb, “away,” obscures the destination of Fraser’s men, the destination
of most people leaving the Illinois country in a hurry: New Orleans, easily and quickly
reached on the steady, south-running river currents. River news traveled fast, and it was born
on the river systems by all peoples. Communication spread from east to west as well as north
to south. In the summer of 1765, for instance, General Gage wrote to William Penn about his
concerns over a “large convoy of goods [that went] from New Orleans to Illinois in
February.” Gage felt it was necessary to open trade back at Fort Pitt as soon as possible, and
to “give notice of it,” to the Indians of the Ohio. If the Ohio Valley tribes were to learn of
the goods convoy in the Illinois, especially if trade were postponed at Fort Pitt, “the Indians
will soon discover where supplies are to be had, and we shall drive them again into the Arms
of the French.”36 The location of Fort Pitt at the confluence of three rivers, and especially its
connections to the Ohio, assured that Indian tribes would discover trade commodity surpluses
and deficits quickly.
33
See the copy of the “Memorial of Major Farmar and the Officers of the Thirty-Fourth Regiment of Infantry of
his Britannic Majesty, who had been commanded to take possession of the Illinois via the Mississippi River,” in
Alvord and Carter, The Critical Period, p. 498-499.
34
Gage to Hillsborough, August 17, 1768, in Trade and Politics, p. 377. The French also had difficulty with
desertions. The Kaskaskia Records detail “criminal proceedings” against ten French soldiers in 1753. See
Kaskaskia MS 53:11:28:2.
35
Fraser to Gage, May 26, 1765, in Alvord and Carter, The Critical Period, p. 515.
36
Gage to Penn, June 16, 1765, The Critical Period, p. 518-519.
262
A riverine relay system connected the eastern and western tribes; the ease of river travel
also allowed for networks of Indian alliances. At an Indian Council in New Orleans in
February of 1765, a Shawnee chief named Charlot Kaske (Cornstalk or Corn Cob) told
French authorities, “Here is a belt with five branches...it contains the names of forty-seven
villages, the inhabitants of which wish to die attached to the French, defending their land to
the last drop of their blood.” While the French governor D’Abbadie tried to dissuade the
Shawnee from attacking the English, an Illinois Indian chief identified as “Levacher” also
spoke. He took out “a little round piece of skin to which were attached 60 porcelain beads.”
According to the eye witness who wrote of the moment, the beads represented the number of
nations to which Levacher and the Illinois were allied.37 This visual symbol of alliance – a
skin world rimmed with sixty porcelain nations – helps to explain the importance of the
Illinois Indians both to other tribes and to the Europeans. With some of the smallest numbers
of people by 1765, the four Illinois tribes were nonetheless wooed by Pontiac, sought out by
the Osage from across the Missouri, and identified by the British in their correspondence as
key players in the contraband French fur trade.
The Shawnee and Illinois chiefs had traveled to New Orleans to see “their father who
lives at the warm town.” Levacher stated that he came “from the Illinois to see if it were true
that the country had been ceded to the English.”38 These Indian chiefs returned to their lands
bearing news, and that news spread to the villages and nations with whom they were allied.
The back and forth exchange of both accurate information and rumor created a different kind
of matrix for the British at Fort Chartres. Levacher, for instance, interpreted the British
injunction against the sale of gunpowder as “they wish that we starve.” He declared
37
38
Indian Council of February 24, 1765, in The Critical Period, p. 450.
Ibid.
263
passionately that “we [the Illinois tribes] shall not be embarrassed, having bows and arrows,
and if there is no wood, we should find rushes.”39 Despite nearly seventy years of access to
French firearms, the Illinois chief still affirmed the use of bow and arrow among his people.
Such sentiments certainly were re-expressed back in the villages of the Illinois. Their
kinship connections, especially to the eastern Illinois bands of Miami, Wea, Piankeshaw, and
Mascouten ensured the spread of such suspicions. Into this land of rumor arrived the British.
The eastern shore Indians, finding that the fur trade was shifting into the rich Missouri lands
across the river, experiencing the dissolution of their old provisioning trade relations with
Europeans, at risk through the 1760’s and 1770’s from attacks by northern allied bands of
Sauk, Fox, Potawatomi, and some Sioux, used the resource of information to survive in the
English-controlled lands of the Illinois. Survival was centered directly on the British
storehouse and artillery at Fort Chartres. It was maintained indirectly through relationships
with the remaining French in the Illinois Country. Yet even this explanation is too simple.
The loyalty of the Mechigamea, for instance, to the French still located near the fort and at
Prairie du Rocher – peoples who had lived near each other on adjacent lands since 1720 –
was concomitant with an imposed political loyalty to the British. The two allegiances were
very different emotionally and arose out of two opposite historical tracks. An aborted attack
of Potawatomi on the French and British living outside the fort in May of 1768 illustrates this
complex relationship.
39
Indian Council of February 24, 1765, in Clarence Alvord, The Critical Period, p. 451.
264
“The alarm word King George was made known to all the inhabitants....”40
Kaskaskia was “the most populous village” left in old French Illinois, with mere
scatterings of French at Prairie du Rocher, St. Philip and Cahokia. In 1752, Kaskaskia had
58 French males, while Prairie du Rocher had 10 men and Cahokia 18. Thirty-one Indian
men and 44 Indian women lived at Kaskaskia; Prairie du Rocher had only five Indian
inhabitants.41 By 1769, Father Meurin described Prairie du Rocher as “a little village of
twenty-four souls, including two inhabitants who are at Fort Chartres one league distant.”42
The French village of Chartres, whose construction and property sales furnished so many rich
notarial records, was abandoned in 1765; some British soldiers and their families were living
in the old settlement between the fort and Prairie du Rocher. From the bluffs stretched
bottomland prairie, partially-cleared by French farmers, dotted with copses of hazel and
small, ragged stands of fruit trees planted by the people of Chartres. Many of the farms
remained abandoned, however. St. Philippe, which in 1765 had ten or twelve French houses
and a church, was almost completely emptied; all inhabitants “but one” crossed to the
Spanish side.43 Up at Cahokia, the land was as vacant: Father Gibault left a description of
French Cahokia, written in 1768 to Bishop Briand in Quebec. Gibault was arguing to be
posted at Kaskaskia rather than at Cahokia. He characterizes Cahokia as a place
...small and distant from all others, that mission formerly so flourishing is nothing any
more, not a slave; the mills are in ruins, the milldams have been carried away by the
waters, barns have fallen, the orchard for lack of a fence has been destroyed by
animals, which have eaten the bark off the trees clear to the sap....44
40
Journal of John Jennings, May 8, 1768, in Alvord and Carter, Trade and Politics, p. 276.
Recencement General Du Pais Des Illinois 1752 in Margaret Cross Norton, editor, Illinois Census Returns,
1810, 1818 (Springfield, Illinois: Illinois State Historical Library, 1935), pp. xxvi-xxvii.
42
Meurin to Briand, June 14, 1769, in Trade and Politics, p. 550.
43
See Paul L. Stevens, “One of the Most Beautiful Regions of the World”: Paul Des Ruisseaux’s Memoire of
the Wabash-Illinois Country in 1777,” Indiana Magazine of History, Vol. 83 (4), 1987, p. 378, n. 30.
44
Gibault to Briand, October, 1769, in Trade and Politics, p. 615.
41
265
Gibault makes no mention of the Cahokia Indians, nor the Peoria who sometimes lived with
them. Yet to the south, the Mechigamea continued to occupy a village “three quarters of a
mile distant” from Fort Chartres, north along the river. Back toward the bluffs perhaps two
miles, nestled under the protective rise of sheer limestone and granite, lay the tiny village of
Prairie du Rocher. As such, it was the closest French village to the Mechigamea. Fleeting
references in British letters describe the land around the fort as “wide and open,” or coated
with immensely tall grasses (cord grass and big bluestem, or turkey foot). In May, however,
those grasses would just have begun to grow again, making the approach of attacking Indians
quite visible.
Between May 5 and May 10, according to the terse entries in the journal of John Jennings,
Potawatomi Indians launched an attack on a place identified by John Jennings as “the
village.” It is not entirely clear whether this refers to the British occupying the old Chartres
site or to Prairie du Rocher. Mention of “the church” makes it more likely to have been
Prairie du Rocher, since St. Anne’s chapel near the fort was long abandoned and St. Joseph’s
church in Prairie du Rocher, with its adjacent cemetery, was the place of worship. Jennings’
account begins with Peoria Indians meeting sixty Potawatomi while hunting; the Potawatomi
told the Peoria “they were going to attack the English.” The location of this exchange of
information was likely somewhere along the Illinois River, between its confluence with the
Mississippi and the northeast turn into the Kankakee. Potawatomi had settled in the
Kankakee valley and ranged south to hunt and meet (illegal) Spanish traders. The Peoria
immediately relayed the news of the impending attack to the British, using the intermediary
of an Algonquian-speaking Frenchman at Cahokia. Jennings recounts that “Centinels were
placed at the Avenues of the Village” and night patrols organized. The French and British
266
inhabitants were “muster’d together and armed.” Despite these precautions, a British soldier
and his wife were kidnapped by Potawatomis right out of the village. Immediately twenty
soldiers and “a party of the Mitchigamie, who are our friends,” went in pursuit. Across the
next few days, Jennings records even more elaborate precautions. Double sentinels were
placed at the village avenues, and the alarm cry of “King George!” given as the warning.
Hearing this, all inhabitants were to repair “armed” to the Rendezvous site. Through the
night several times the alarm was given, as sentinels saw strange Indians “creeping close” or
“advancing.” Eventually, the Kaskaskia Indians also set out in pursuit of the Potawatomi
war party, while “the Guards and Centinels continu[ed] in the Village both Night, & day.”
At noon on May 9 again “the drums beat to Arms...” as a relay system sent news of an
approaching party of Indians on the Mississippi. The Kaskaskia Chief Tomera and his
warriors went to determine who was coming. At the Mechigamea village they met some
Chippewa men and women crossing from St. Louis. These Indians were immediately
suspected of being spies and the guard maintained around the village. After May 10,
however, there seems to have been no further alarm.45
While both the Mechigamea and Kaskaskia are described as defending “the village,” this
five-day tale illustrates more than political loyalty. The Illinois Indians had been habitually
attacked by the Potawatomi, often allied with the Fox and Sauk (see Chapter Five for the
combined Potawatomi-Fox raid on the Mechigamea and Cahokia villages, 1752). However,
the Potawatomi were a splintered tribe by the 1760’s, with two major factions divided
geographically and politically. The Potawatomi living around Fort Detroit had made peace
with the British after Pontiac’s War while the “St. Joseph Potawatomi” maintained a bitter
45
See the account of this intrigue in Jennings’ Journal, May 5-May 10, 1768, printed in Trade and Politics, pp
275 – 278.
267
hostility to them. By the late 1760’s, “St. Joseph Potawatomi” had become a cluster term
describing bands of Indians living everywhere but Detroit and led mostly by younger men.
While the Potawatomi at the French St. Joseph mission had a long history of occupying the
area, most of the original dissenting Potawatomi had dispersed south into the Illinois
Kankakee River Valley.46 There they were able to participate in illegal trade with Spanish
and French using the waterways of Illinois to penetrate deep into the north-central area.
Early accounts of the land south of the Detroit area identify it as exceptionally wet and
marshy, also a riverine world traced with many waterways and the timbered shorelines of
great lakes. Southern Michigan, in fact, was a land of salt springs and abundant “salt brine.”
Studies have estimated that Michigan’s reserves of salt “are so immense they could supply
the world’s needs for thousands of years.”47 Despite these deposits, which Indians knew
about and used, salt was so expensive up at Detroit that “very little, if any, meat was salted
for sale.”48 Salt was also available to the south, along the Illinois River, on the east bank
above the mouth of the Vermillion. These saline deposits were described in 1773 as “two salt
ponds 100 yards in circumference...water is stagnant and of a yellowish colour; but the
French and natives make good salt from it.”49 Salt deposits were strategically placed
between the northwestern Potawatomi and the Mississippi, providing a means of preserving
46
See George Pare, “The St. Joseph Mission” Mississippi Valley Historical Review Vol. 17 (1), June, 1930, pp.
24-54. Pare concludes that when Charlevoix visited the St. Joseph area in 1721, the mission was “in all
likelihood” on a site that had been occupied by French and Indians since 1693. Charlevoix found a Potawatomi
village on one side of the St. Joseph River and a Miami village on the other. A 1725 map drawn by the chief
engineer of New France also notes the presence of the Potawatomi village on the St. Joseph River. See Joseph
L. Peyser’s introduction to On the Eve of the Conquest: The Chevalier de Raymond’s Critique of New France in
1754 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1997), p. 41, n. 38.
47
Information on salt taken from Willis F. Dunbar, Michigan: A History of the Wolverine State (Grand Rapids:
William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1970), p. 413.
48
Michigan Pioneer & Historical Collections, Vol. 1 (Lansing: W.S. George & Co., Printers and Binders,
1877), p. 102.
49
Patrick Kennedy, cited in Raymond Hauser, “An Ethnohistory of the Illinois Indian Tribe, 1673 – 1832,”
unpublished doctoral dissertation, Northern Illinois University, 1973, p. 97. This dissertation is available at the
Illinois Historical Survey in Urbana-Champaign.
268
meat and game and perhaps allowing the independence of the tribal factions from the main
Potawatomi around Detroit. One account of the activities of a French priest along the Illinois
River near Peoria makes note of his participation in a buffalo hunt with “the Indians north of
Peoria.” 50 It is not known who these Indians were, but the Grand Prairie of Illinois was
clearly a theater for the meeting of many peoples, including the French, not all of whom had
crossed the river.
The French around Detroit and south near St. Joseph maintained similar cultural traditions
to the French in the Illinois. They built houses of oak and cedar and marked off their property
with “pickets of red cedar” ten to twelve feet high. Incoming American settlers often
mentioned the orchards of apples and cherries. An account from 1837 describes some of the
red cedar posts still standing in Detroit.51 Thus the natural and cultural landscape of French
Illinois would have felt very familiar to Potawatomi raiders in 1768: marshy earth
interspersed with some stands of thick timber, a landscape mosaic including improved
agricultural lands, and dwellings displaying the familiar closely-set pickets. Potawatomi
approaching on horses would have been at home wending their way through the wet prairies
and inundated floodplain of the Mississippi in May. These western Potawatomi had
relocated to the Kankakee area, another river system, one in which they were more available
to both Spanish and French and northern tribes like the Fox and Sauk. Along the Kankakee
they were reinforced in their belief that the British should be driven from the Illinois. One
50
Nehemiah Matson, Pioneers of Illinois containing a series of sketches that occurred previous to 1813
(Chicago: Knight and Leonard, Printers, 1882), pp. 178 – 179.
51
Michigan Pioneer & Historical Collections, Vol. 1, p. 358.
269
historian has described the clashes between St. Joseph Potawatomi and the British in the late
1760’s as “the western-Potawatomi-British feud.”52
The feud took the predominant form of guerrilla attacks on British traders. The raid on the
Chartres area was but one incident in a long chain of attacks. The ubiquitous George Croghan
in his role of Indian agent met with the Potawatomi at Detroit in 1767 but achieved little.
The Potawatomi living around the St. Joseph River area of Michigan and south into Illinois
“bragged” that they “would not Suffer an English Man to come near their Place.”53 These
Illinois Potawatomi remained loyal to Pontiac’s vision of western lands emptied of British
and restored to the Indians who had lived there, despite the ancient inter-tribal warfare that
characterized relationships among the tribes of the Upper Mississippi River Valley.54
During Pontiac’s efforts to unite the western tribes, the Illinois Indians, assisted by the
French, had been supplying him with ammunition and supplies. Their anti-British sentiments
and loyalty to Onontio, the French father, mirrored the feelings of the St. Joseph Potawatomi.
At least one historian believes this activity – most especially the supplying of ammunition to
Pontiac – prompted the British to occupy the Illinois earlier than they had planned.55 When
the Illinois Indians appeared to have capitulated under British rule and to have traitorously
52
See R. David Edmunds, The Potawatomis: Keepers of the Fire (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press,
1978), p. 97, but especially the chapter titled “Serving Two Fathers,” which discusses the factions in the
Potawatomi. Elders of the Potawatomi offered the same explanations for violence and intrigue as did the Illinois
Indians in accounting for the 1752 conspiracy (see Chapter Five). Older chiefs claimed they could not control
younger, intemperate men. This generational issue is also treated in Richard White’s analysis of the Miami in
The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650 –1815 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 210 – 214.
53
See this account in Edmunds, The Potawatomis, p. 98.
54
See Gregory Evans Dowd, “The French King Wakes Up in Detroit: ‘Pontiac’s War’ in Rumor and History,”
Ethnohistory Vol. 37(3), Summer, 1990, pp. 254 – 278. Dowd analyzes the role of rumor in Pontiac’s War,
arguing that Indians’ use of rumor concerning the return of the French King represented a deliberate Indian
tactic of trying to influence the French. A historian who believes western tribes tried to “reshape the diplomatic
role of the British from an ineffective elder brother to a new father figure” is Jon William Parmeter, “Pontiac’s
War: Forging New Links in the Anglo-Iroquois Covenant Chain 1758 – 1766,” Ethnohistory Vol. 44 (4),
Autumn, 1997, pp. 617 –654. See p. 637 for quote.
55
See Clarence Carter, Great Britain and the Illinois Country 1763 – 1774 (Freeport, New York: Books for
Libraries Press, 1971 (1910)), p. 35.
270
abandoned the good fight, the Potawatomi were fiercely retaliatory. Somewhat astonishing
in this tale of political anger and betrayal is the great disparity in numbers between the
Potawatomi, the Sauk, the Fox – and the Illinois. The Fox Indians, in fact, had experienced a
resurgence of population during the post 1763 fur trade years.56 Between 1700 and 1763,
however, the number of Illinois Indians fell from 6000 to 2000. Some historians believe this
number is too conservative, with one estimate placing the loss of Illinois at over 90% of their
pre-contact numbers.57 The Potawatomi numbers remained higher; the Detroit Potawatomi,
who supported Henry Hamilton’s “western warfare” plan during the American Revolution,
were able to contribute at least one hundred warriors to the one thousand mixed-nation force
Hamilton sent south to raid Kentucky in 1777.58
In 1778, George Morgan estimated the
Potawatomi at Detroit as having “400 men.”59 Despite population differences, northern
Illinois and Michigan tribes saw the greatly-reduced Illinois as traditional enemies to be “cut
off.”60 However, the two groups of Potawatomi continued to be perceived differently by
most Europeans. Back in 1769, the St. Joseph Potawatomi were listed on a “Report of the
Various Indian Tribes Receiving Presents in the District of Ylinoa or Illinois, 1769.” In
addition to the four Illinois tribes – the “Kaskaskia, Kaokias, Peorias, and Metchigamia” –
the roster, prepared by the outgoing French commander St. Ange for the incoming Spanish,
56
See Jeanne Kay, “The Fur Trade and Native American Population Growth,” Ethnohistory 31(4), Autumn,
1984, pp. 265 – 287. Note especially the population growth charts on p. 273; the Fox show a steady resurgence
following a low in numbers during the Fox Wars of the 1730’s. By 1800, they may have numbered between
1500 and 2,000.
57
See Helen Hornbeck Tanner, Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History, Chapter 8, note 4, p. 42, cited in Charles J.
Balesi, The Time of the French in the Heart of North America 1673 – 1818 (Chicago: Alliance Francais
Chicago, 1992), p. 243. John K. White, believes the drop was even more significant: “By the mid 1700’s a
century of continual warfare had reduced the Illinois by 90%.” See White’s article, “Illinois,” in the
Encyclopedia of North American Indians, Fred E. Howe, editor (New York: Houghton-Mifflin Co., 1996).
58
Edmunds, The Potawatomi, p. 100.
59
Cited in Joseph Jablow, Indians of Illinois and Indiana: Illinois, Kickapoo, and Potawatomi Indians (New
York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1974) p. 283.
60
This phrase seems to have been used by Black Dog, a Peoria chief, to Commander Wilkins. The Kaskaskias
also may have used it in referring to a rumor of nations coming in “150 Canoes who have long since threaten’d
to Cutt off the nations of the Illinois...” Both instances appear in Jablow, Indians of Illinois and Indiana, p. 269.
271
identifies “Puotuatami” “of the river of San Joseph and that of Ylinnese.” St. Ange wrote at
the end of this report, “I certify the tribes here above expressed are the same ones who are
accustomed to come here to get presents.”61 It is important to keep careful track of the
timing of these reports and activities. The Potawatomi raid on the Chartres area occurred in
May of 1768; a year later in May of 1769 both the Illinois and the Potawatomi are identified
as habitually receiving presents from the French; in a similar document prepared in 1777,
both the Potawatomi and the “Peorias and Kaskaskias” are listed as receiving presents from
the Spanish.62 In this last report, the St. Joseph Potawatomi are counted as having 150
warriors while the two tribes of the Illinois combined have 100 (the Mechigamea and the
Cahokia are not mentioned).
Despite the fact that both nations – the Illinois and Potawatomi of St. Joseph – were using
the resources of the French and Spanish, great heated feeling seethed under these
international pseudo-alliances. In addition to cultural patterns of retaliation, tribes
experiencing dislocation and the breakdown of internal leadership structures often projected
their feelings of vulnerability onto lesser tribes, blaming them for displaying opportunistic
allegiances. One study of the Potawatomi in this period points out that each tribal faction or
society “harbored within its limits variant opinions and alternative adaptations” arising from
distinctive histories of interaction with Europeans and with other Indian nations.63 Within
one hundred years, in fact, the Potawatomi had reversed their patterns of trade and cultural
allegiance with the Illinois Indians. They had initially adopted the calumet ceremony from
61
See “Report of the Various Indian Tribes Receiving Presents in the District of Ylinoa or Illinois, 1769,” in
Louis Houck, The Spanish Regime in Missouri, Volume I (Chicago: R.R. Donnelly & Sons Company, 1909), p.
44.
62
See “Report of the Indian Tribes Who Receive Presents At St. Louis, Dated November 15, 1777” in Houck,
The Spanish Regime, pp. 141 – 148.
63
James A Clifton, The Prairie People: Continuity and Change in Potawatomi Indian Culture, 1665 – 1965
(Lawrence: The Regents Press of Kansas, 1977), p. 132.
272
the Illinois after 1667, as they traded to the south; they incorporated this important pipe stem
and bowl ritual into their own practices as an act of closure to an inter-tribal compact or
agreement.64 Also like the Illinois, the Potawatomi in the first half of the eighteenth century
were dominated by the Fox Wars and Fox raids. The Fox considered the Potawatomi “their
most desperate enemies,” and Potawatomi joined the massive French and Indian force which
nearly exterminated the Fox on the Grand Prairie in the early 1730’s. Fighting beside them
were Illinois Indians.65 Less than twenty-five years later the Illinois had taken the place of
the Fox as those most desperate enemies, and the Fox and Potawatomi were allied. In this
shifting, unstable world of recombining allegiances, the kind of anger fueled by acts of
perceived betrayal could be completely disproportionate to the incident. In 1751, for
example, the Potawatomi became incensed over the death of a fractious chief named La Grue
(The Crane). He was killed in a northern Peoria village along the Illinois River as
Potawatomi passed through the area. Documents establish that La Grue was in fact “a
notorious trouble-maker and started the dispute,” yet the Potawatomi could not forget the
incident. The tradition of retaliation among the Potawatomi was documented as early as
1677 when Father Allouez, the successor to Father Marquette, stayed with “Poueteouatamis”
near Green Bay. He described a “bear war” that erupted in which the Potawatomi killed over
500 bears in retaliation for the death of a single Potawatomi brave who was mauled.66
The Potawatomi were no different from other Great Lakes and prairie Indian tribes in
preserving deep patterns of retaliatory warfare. In addition to the many historical and
anthropological studies establishing tribal warfare as a constant, archaeological evidence has
64
James A. Clifton, The Prairie People, p. 124.
Ibid., p. 89.
66
Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed., Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, Volume LX (Cleveland: The Burrows
Brothers Co., 1900), p. 153.
65
273
revealed striking evidence of murderous assault in the Oneota culture, the prehistoric Indian
group occupying the Illinois in the centuries before the French descent of the rivers. Studies
of fractures in interred skeletons found in one Oneota burial site in west-central Illinois, circa
1300, suggest not only surprise attack but repeated attacks. Of 264 burials, 43 partial or
complete skeletons indicated violent death. Archaeologists conclude that “lethal trauma...is
unambiguous” at this grave site: numerous skull fractures were caused by the wielding of
stone-ground celts, and mutilation was present as well, including scalping and decapitation.
Many remains show evidence of old injuries.67 Although the connection between the Oneota
culture and the historic Indian tribes is uncertain, the tradition of small-scale attacks among
localized tribes did persist. The earliest recorder of Illinois Indian culture, the Frenchman
Deliette who stayed with the Peoria around 1700, describes flamboyant rituals of warring and
attack on other nations, especially the northern Fox and Sauk. One historian characterizes
the Fox-Illinois “vendetta” as “bitter and of long duration.” The lodges of the Fox proudly
displayed many “Cahokia and Kaskaskia scalps.” In one 1730 Illinois Indian ambush of Fox
prisoners, three women were killed and fifteen Fox taken prisoner.68 Even after the defeat of
the Fox on the Grand Prairie in 1730, the Illinois conducted retaliatory raids north along the
Mississippi and Illinois Rivers, especially on isolated Fox hunters. Yet by the time of the
British occupation, the Illinois were more consistently focused on survival, on food and
clothing procurement, than on resource-driven warfare. Perhaps their nearly seventy-year
interaction with Europeans in intimate quarters, as the domiciled Indians of the French
villages, had changed them. Yet despite shifts that may have occurred within their own
67
George R. Milner, Eve Anderson, and Virginia G. Smith, “Warfare in Late Prehistoric West-Central Illinois,”
American Antiquity, Vol. 56 (4), October, 1991, pp. 582 – 583.
68
R. David Edmunds and Joseph L. Peyser, The Fox Wars: The Mesquakie Challenge to New France
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993), pp. 163 – 164.
274
culture, the Peoria certainly understood the Potawatomi retaliatory tradition to be vital. After
the death of La Grue, they sent gifts to his family, but La Grue’s relatives and kinsmen
remained focused on revenge. The Peoria even sent a message to the Potawatomi:
Why do you disturb the earth for a fool who has been killed? What is your reason
for coming to such extremes? Some of our people who were married in your
villages have been killed there and we have never taken up arms to revenge
ourselves. Moreover, if you attack us we will avenge ourselves; the earth will be
disturbed and the roads will be closed through your fault.69
Such pleas were to no avail. Revenge for La Grue’s death took the form of the catastrophic
raid on the Mechigamea village in 1752. The memory of that raid – the scattered, hacked-off
limbs of men, women, and children macerating in their riverine corn fields – was yet
searingly vivid. The Illinois aligned themselves with the ruling power who could best protect
them from northern enemies. They used a skillful, swift relay system of reporting
information to keep themselves safe. The fact that today at least two of the Illinois tribes
survive in Oklahoma is testament to the way these Indians read and used the political system
of the late eighteenth century, at a time when their own livelihood was highly compromised
through environmental degradation and the influx of many peoples. One way of reading the
historical record has invited interpretations of dependency and weakness. This is most
strongly expressed in analyses of the way the Illinois behaved at the time of Pontiac’s murder
in 1769.
69
Reported by La Jonquiere to the French minister, September 25, 1751, Wisconsin Historical Collections,
XVIII, p. 89, cited in Edmunds, The Potawatomi, p. 49.
275
“There came to Fort Chartres ...a party of the Peoria from Kahokie with the greatest
Apprehensions of that nation soon being Struck by many other Nations....”70
On April 20, 1769, a Peoria Indian stabbed Pontiac to death in Cahokia, possibly in the
Indian village near Cahokia, “au Millieu du Village des Kahoquias.” At least one historian
interprets this attack as an act of vengeance: months earlier, Pontiac himself had stabbed
Black Dog, the great Peoria chief. Pontiac’s murderer was a grandson of Black Dog.71 The
death of La Grue in the Peoria village back in 1751 was much less significant compared to
the death of Pontiac at the hands of a Peoria warrior in 1769. A bitter international war had
been fought in the interim. Land had changed hands and had been changed itself through
British occupancy: the influx of soldiers, traders, merchandise convoys, and new Indian
tribes inscribed the abandoned French lands with new trails, paths, landing places, and roads.
Pontiac’s vision had temporarily united western Indian nations; yet that war was driven by a
fiery purpose and passionate cause that burned intensely and briefly, succeeding only at first
through the Indian traditional warfare tactic of swift, surprise attack.72 Siege warfare
requiring steady flows of ammunition, powder and foodstuffs to attacking nations asked too
much of the Indian supply systems of the old Northwest. After Pontiac negotiated a peace
with the British, he was instrumental in stopping further violence at the time the British
arrived in the Illinois. On at least two occasions, he prevented the murder of British envoys:
once in the case of Lieutenant Fraser at Fort Chartres and once in the case of George
Croghan, held captive along the Ohio River. Historians have commented on the waste and
70
Cited in Joseph Jablow, Indians of Illinois and Indiana: Illinois, Kickapoo, and Potawatomi Indians (New
York: Garland Publishing Inc., 1974), p. 274.
71
Gregory Evans Dowd, War Under Heaven: Pontiac, the Indian-Nations, and the British Empire (Baltimore:
The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), p. 249.
72
See Gregory Evans Dowd, War Under Heaven, for an interpretation of Pontiac’s War as a struggle for
political definition and status in the new British territory.
276
ignominy of Pontiac’s death outside a trading post on the muddy streets of Cahokia.73 To the
Illinois Indians, waste and ignominy were the least concerns: they were extremely alarmed.
The log of Colonel Wilkins in command at Fort Chartres documents that the Peoria arrived in
May, barely a month after Pontiac’s murder, “in 30 canoes by water & a large party by land.”
Wilkins tried to reassure the Peoria and asked them to return, but they refused.74 Four chiefs
negotiated with Wilkins to obtain British protection. They eventually settled with the
Mechigamea in their village, yet five Illinois Indians were scalped between the fort and the
Indian village.75 In July, in the middle of a storm of rumors that angry northern tribes were
massing against the Illinois, the Cahokia arrived, “[leaving] their village of Kehakie to Settle
here with the Peories & Mitches....” The tribes worked together to fortify a village with a
stockade “on a rising Ground in full Sight (& within Canon Shot) of the Fort....”76
Rumors
of attacks and retaliation for the death of Pontiac continued from 1769 through the early
1770’s. The messaging fervor created a swirl of “rumors and misinformation” that “drifted
down the Mississippi to New Orleans.”77 Sporadic raiding by Potawatomi against the Illinois
British and Indian settlements also continued, although there was no definitive attack on the
Illinois Indians. This reality underscores the way the Illinois were focusing on survival and
had managed to insure it. In 1773 - 1774, when the British Indian commissioner Sir William
73
See, for instance, Francis Parkman, “Thus basely perished this champion of a ruined race,” in The Conspiracy
of Pontiac and the Indian War After the Conquest of Canada, Vol. II (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company,
1917), p. 329; Howard Peckham in Pontiac and the Indian Uprising (New York: Russell and Russell, 1947)
describes the Peoria as having “a reputation for ambush and assassination as a policy of foreign relations, with
the bully’s surprise and outraged cry when they were drubbed for their cowardly attacks.” See Peckham, p.
310.
74
Gregory Evans Dowd believes that Wilkins refused the Peoria admittance to Fort Chartres. See Dowd, War
Under Heaven, p. 261.
75
See Wilkin’s accounts in Jablow, Indians of Illinois and Indiana, p. 268.
76
Wilkins, cited in Jablow, p. 269.
77
Gregory Evans Dowd, War Under Heaven, p. 172.
277
Johnson attempted to negotiate an inter-tribal peace among the western nations, the Illinois
did not attend the conference but sent a reply through a Shawnee chief. He brought
a Message from the three Illinois Indian Nations called the Kaskaskeys...they
cou’d not comply with their desire to come to their Country, on account of the
nations about them being in continual war with some Nation, or other who they
must always be in dread of being struck by, and therefore cou’d not leave their
Families exposed to them.78
During these early years of the 1770’s, the Ilinois country was perceived by all who lived
in it as unstable and dangerous. In command at Fort Chartres, Colonel Wilkins, who has
entered history as “the notorious Colonel Wilkins” for his financial intrigues and highhandedness with commercial traders and French alike, perceived the vulnerability of the
Illinois Indians. One historian grudgingly admits that Wilkins “had a way with the Indians
that they liked.”79 In addition to sometimes dispensing gifts more liberally than the British
policies at the time permitted, Wilkins took seriously the information given to him by the
Illinois. In 1769, three Kaskaskia chiefs came to the fort –Baptiste, Tomeroy, and Laudeviet.
They told Wilkins, “express[ing] strong fear,” that the Chickasaw Indians intended to “cut
them off.” Wilkins successfully calmed the Kaskaskia and invited them to “settle under the
protection of the English.”80 In 1771, Wilkins’ log between April 19 and 27 details the
arrival 20 young Chickasaw braves at Fort Chartres, who came “as if to avoid being seen.”
Wilkins’ efforts to keep animosities from breaking out between these Chickasaw and the
Illinois Indians were really quite extraordinary. He housed the Chickasaw in a room inside
the fort instead of in the “savage house” that stood outside the gates; he listened patiently to
their concerns. The Indians privately expressed to the Colonel “their hatred of the Illinois.”
78
This message appears in its entirety in Joseph Jablow, Indians of Illinois and Indiana, p. 279.
Colton Storm, “The Notorious Colonel Wilkins,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Vol. XL,
March, 1947, p. 17.
80
Log of Colonel Wilkins, cited in Storm, “The Notorious,” p. 20.
79
278
Wilkins knew of a Chickasaw “that had long been married in this Country to a Woman of the
Peoria,” and he invited this man to the fort to negotiate a peace agreement. Colonel Wilkins
spent the 22, 23, 24, and 25 of April “in Counsil with parties of the nations of the Illinois,
Chickasaws, and Shawanes.” In a complicated negotiation, Wilkins offered presents to the
Chickasaw that included brass bells and Jews harps, powder, lead, clothing, and knives, and
sent them south to their villages.81 Despite being recalled by the British in 1772 for financial
mismanagement, Colonel Wilkins protected the Illinois Indians from both their northern and
southern enemies. Part of his success may simply have been the magnitude of Fort Chartres,
its imposing size and range of canon atop the limestone walls. Those walls were being
undermined by the Mississippi, however, and in 1772, the British abandoned the fort. They
moved south to Kaskaskia, occupying the old Jesuit mission grounds and house, also built of
stone.82 This new location they named Fort Gage. It was from Fort Gage in April of 1773
that Captain Hugh Lord wrote to General Gage about his namesake fort: “The Indians have
also been unavoidable, great numbers of Indians of different Nations being almost
continually here.”83 General Haldimand also reported to General Gage in 1773, “I enclose
herewith a copy of a letter that I received from the Illinois...you see, sir, that disorder is
increasing every day....”84 It is not known whether the Peoria, Cahokia, and Mechigamea
were among those Indians massing near Fort Gage or whether they continued to live near the
abandoned and destroyed Fort Chartres. It is clear, however, that they used two other means
to insure their survival: they sold off more land, and they migrated south into Arkansas (the
81
See this section of Wilkins’ journal printed in Colton Storm, “The Notorious,” p. 20. The original “Journal of
Transactions and Presents Given to the Indians from 23rd December, 1768, to March 12, 1772,” is preserved
among the General Gage papers in the William Clements Library, Ann Arbor, Michigan.
82
Clarence Carter, Great Britain and the Illinois Country 1763 – 1774, p. 156.
83
Captain Lord to General Gage, April 9, 1773, in British Museum Additional Manuscripts 21664:148 and
21665:289. Photostats at the Illinois Historical Survey.
84
Haldimand to Gage, October 5, 1773, in British Museum Additional Manuscripts (see above).
279
Kaskaskia) and west to the St. Louis area (the Peoria). For a time, they were much farther
away from Potawatomi and Fox raiders.85
In the early 1770’s, members of newly-formed land companies that had grown out of
merchant involvement in British Illinois acquired land from the Illinois Indians. In his
introduction to “The Illinois-Wabash Land Company,” Clarence Alvord begins, “Trade and
land speculation! The story of these activities contain the history of the early exploration and
colonization of western America.”86 With this ringing exhortation, Alvord’s analysis
underscores the zeal and determination of eastern land speculators – and his admiration for
their efforts. The original deed of sale is preserved, carefully drawn up as a legal document
and notarized in Kaskaskia in 1773; in it appears the list of goods the Illinois obtained for
selling two large tracts of land to William Murray, representative of the Illinois-Wabash
Land Company (these sales were subsequently declared illegal by General Gage and also
never acknowledged by any American court, despite repeated efforts of the investors to that
end). The merchandise, the price of their land, tells a revealing story of the Illinois nations
on the eve of the American Revolution. In exchange for two rich tracts, “one on the Illinois
River and one on the Ohio,”87 the Illinois asked for the following:
Two hundred and Sixty Strouds, Two hundred and fifty Blankets, Three hundred and
fifty Shirts, One hundred and fifty pairs of Stroud and half thicke Stockings, One
hundred and fifty Stroud Breech Cloaths, Five hundred pounds of Gun Powder, Four
thousand pounds of Lead – Thirty pounds of Vermillion, Two thousand gun flints, Two
hundred pounds of brass kettles, One Groce [gross] of knives, Two hundred pounds of
85
See account of this migration in Stanley Faye, “Illinois Indians on the Lower Mississippi, 1771 –1781,”
Illinois State Historical Society, Vol. 35 (1942), pp. 56 – 72. The Kakaskia sought refuge among the Quapaw
and tried to establish a fur trading niche in the Spanish empire. One group of Kaskaskia even took furs all the
way to the British settlements in South Carolina. See Faye, p. 60.
86
Clarence W. Alvord, “The Illinois-Wabash Land Company Manuscript,” (Chicago: Cyrus H. McCormick,
1915), p. 9. See also Jack M. Sosin, The Revolutionary Frontier 1763 –1783 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and
Winston, 1967), pp. 31 – 38, for a detailed account of the operations of British land speculators, including
members of the British army.
87
Ibid., p. 14.
280
Tobacco, Three Dozen gilt looking glasses, One groce of gun worms [?], Two groce of
awls, One Groce of fire Steels, Sixteen dozen of gartering, Ten thousand pounds of
flour, Five hundred bushels Indian corn, Twelve horses, Twelve horned Cattle, Twenty
Bushels Salt, and Twenty Guns.88
Conspicuous for its absence on this list is rum or “eaudevie,” as the French traders referred to
it. The British were certainly dispensing alcohol to Indians, for George Morgan even wrote a
proposal to build a distillery in Illinois to accommodate the brisk trade in it.89 In 1768,
Lieutenant Fraser had observed of the Illinois Indians that “nothing can equal their passion
for drunkenness, but that of the French Inhabitants....”90 While the effect of alcohol on the
Illinois is clearly documented, in the early 1770’s, the goods they asked as the price of their
land did not include it. The appearance of horses as part of the price implies they needed
them. Even more telling is the inclusion of flour and Indian corn, suggesting they were no
longer raising enough crops. And last, the Illinois acquired two tons of lead for the making of
bullets.
Across the three decades prior to the arrival of the Americans under George Rogers Clark,
but especially, after the British moved into the Illinois, relations among all groups of peoples
were unstable. One historian has perceptively summarized pre-Revolutionary Illinois as
“thirty-odd years of temporary ends and makeshift means...a period of expediency, with the
course of events influenced by forces beyond the control of any government.”91
Raids into
the areas by northern tribes increased as word spread of the impending conflict between
Britain and her colonies. A letter sent to Commander Rocheblave from Cahokia in 1777
88
See Alvord, “The Illinois-Wabash Land Manuscript,” unnumbered page of facsimile in longhand.
Colton Storm discusses this petition to General Gage, titled “Some Reasons Why the Distillation of Spirits
from Grain Ought to Be Encouraged at the Illinois.” See Storm, “The Notorious,” p. 19.
90
Fraser to Haldimand, cited in McDermott, “French Settlers and Settlements in the Illinois Country,” The
French, The Indians, and George Rogers Clark in the Illinois Country: Proceedings of an Indiana American
Revolution Bicentennial Symposium (Indianapolis Historical Society, 1977), p. 12.
91
See James A. Clifton, The Prairie People, p. 131.
89
281
tersely outlines the level of unrest: “There have been...two Frenchmen killed near St. Joseph
while coming from St. Joseph, and by the Pottawatomies. Also Mr. Chartranc had a finger
cut off by the Renards. Four traders have abandoned their house, and all their effects in the
country along the river of the Illinois.” The same writer adds later, “...both the
Pottawatomies and the Renards say that they wish St. Joseph ravaged and destroyed. There is
nothing but war on every side.”92
The Illinois Country was also re-organizing itself along new lines of trade and livelihood.
Some French families who had crossed the river to live in Spanish Missouri had returned to
British Illinois. In 1777, a Frenchman from Vincennes, Paul Des Ruisseaux, traveled
through the old French settlements. He found that tiny St. Philippe, once almost completely
abandoned, had eight or ten houses re-occupied by Canadiens.93 However, the young French
men of the region were more drawn to hunting and trading than to agriculture, as Philip
Pittman observed in the late 1760’s.94 While the oldest French families at Prairie du Rocher
continued to raise stock and farm, Cahokia had become almost entirely a trade center,
fortuitously located almost directly across the Mississippi from burgeoning Spanish St.
Louis. Cahokia was a long, straggling, ragged village with a “great deal of poultry” but
infrequent and poorly-tended crops. The Cahokia “fort,” wrote Pittman, was only a small
house standing in the middle of the village. “It was formerly enclosed with high palisades,
but these were torn down and burnt.”95 (It is likely the palisades were used as fuel).
92
Richard McCarty to Rocheblave, February 6, 1777, in Edward G. Mason, editor, Early Chicago and Illinois
(Chicago: Fergus Printing Company, 1890), p. 384.
93
Paul Des Ruisseaux, “Memoire of the Wabash-Illinois Country in 1777,” in Paul L. Stevens, “One of the
Most Beautiful,” p. 378.
94
“...most of the young men rather chuse to hunt and trade amongst the Indians, than apply [themselves] to
agriculture or become handicrafts [men]....” Captain Philip Pittman, cited in McDermott, “French Settlers,” p.
11.
95
See McDermott, “French Settlers,” p. 10.
282
Independent French traders, including those traveling up the Mississippi from New Orleans
and the young hunters of the French settlements, became interested in trading south towards
the Ohio River, serving the needs of the Shawnee who had moved farther west. Convoys of
wheat, corn and trade goods left the Kaskaskia area for the confluence of the Ohio and
Mississippi; business was often conducted on river islands.96 Fur trade on the eastern shores
of the Mississippi began to list toward a localized market economy in which Indians and
French alike exchanged one or two furs and peltries to secure goods as needed. The old
pattern of tribes converging at the end of summer and winter hunts with large packs of furs
and pelts was disintegrating into patterns of individual Indians trading single furs for rum or
gunpowder. The Kaskaskia Records contain an account of an Indian visiting the wife of the
British commander at Kaskaskia, M. de Rocheblave, and throwing two beaver skins at her
feet. He then demanded eaudevie, which she refused him.97
This incident is documented in a lengthy court of inquiry conducted by the British only
one year before George Rogers Clark surprised the sleeping village of Kaskaskia and the
Illinois Country changed hands again. A close reading of this inquiry reveals persistent
patterns of old loyalties in a maelstrom year. M. de Rocheblave, a Frenchman commanding
for the British, was accused of treason by an Anglo-American merchant with whom he had a
long-standing feud. A central charge involved a large party of Fox and Sauk Indians –
perhaps as many as six hundred – who were approaching Kaskaskia, apparently with the goal
of eradicating thirty Illinois Indians who had taken refuge in the town. Rocheblave asked
some French inhabitants to take a British flag out to meet the Indians, a visual symbol of
96
See this Ohio River trade mentioned as “common” in a document titled “Defense of Thomas Bentley, August
1, 1777,” in Clarence Alvord, Kaskaskia Records 1778 – 1790 (Springfield, Illinois: The Illinois State
Historical Library, 1909), p. 13.
97
See Clarence Alvord, Kaskaskia Records, p. 30.
283
British military presence. Somehow, en route to the prairies where the Fox were massed, the
British flag became a French flag. Rocheblave denied he had sent a French flag. During the
inquiry, the French inhabitants confessed they were “burdened by the weight of the said
flag,” so they had substituted a “white towel” attached to a pole. The lighter flag would allow
them “to pass more easily through the woods.”98
Although Rocheblave was exonerated, the important point about the Fox not attacking
Kaskaskia seems to have been missed in the inquiry. However they perceived the white
towel on the pole, at that moment, the Fox were deterred. We don’t know what passed
between the Fox-Sauk Indians and a few residents of Kaskaskia who staggered out of the
woods at the edge of the prairie, hoisting what was clearly a French flag. The French
dissatisfaction with British rule would lead to French support during the invasion of George
Rogers Clark in 1778, seen by all historians who write of the bloodless takeover as a critical
factor. In turn, the French may have been instrumental in persuading Indians to accept
American rule.99 Before the American invasion, Commander Rocheblave confessed himself
to be “a little crazed,” as he was forced to imprison young men in Kaskaskia “every day.”
These young French men demanded first that he follow English law and then “the very next
day demand the old French laws which have always been followed.”100 In July of 1778, one
month before being taken prisoner by George Rogers Clark, Rocheblave was writing letters
of alarm from Fort Gage, begging the British to send “at once a body of troops here...we are
on the eve of seeing here a numerous band of brigands.” He mentions as well the difficulty
98
See the detailed account of this incident in Kaskaskia Records, pp. 18 – 40.
See Jack M. Sosin, The Revolutionary Frontier, p. 118. Sosin mentions a wealthy French merchant in
Cahokia, Godfrey de Linctot, who was “invaluable in winning over the neighboring Indians.”
100
Rocheblave to Lieut.-Gov. Hamilton, May 5, 1777, in Mason, Early Chicago, p. 391.
99
284
in controlling Indians, although they are “in general well enough disposed.”101 By “the
Indians,” Rocheblave may have been specifically referring to the Kaskaskia and the
Mechigamea, although many Indian nations continued to visit Fort Gage.
The British had withdrawn their garrison from the Illinois in 1774 -1775 after rebelling
eastern colonists invaded Quebec. Captain Hugh Lord was recalled; the British who had
marched in under Captain Stirling in 1765 marched out in 1775. The evacuation of Fort Gage
left Commander Rocheblave, in his own words, “in charge without troops, without money,
without resources.”102 From that point until August of 1778, when the Illinois Country
became part of the state of Virginia, the land lay in an uneasy limbo. Land speculators and
dreamers planned colonies and settlements with names like Charlotina, Vandalia, and New
Wales – ephemeral, paper settlements in which happy, orderly subjects would live an elegiac
life. Indian nations would be “controlled,” relegated to a buffer zone where animal, fish, and
bird resources would replenish themselves forever. Funneling out of the limitless reservoir
would be a steady stream of peltries enriching the British crown. Of all the unrealistic
conceptions that fueled British dreams for the management of western lands, lack of
ecological understanding was perhaps the most trenchant – and has been the least explored
by scholars. In the eighteenth-century view of the frontier, it was possible to carve out tracts
of land, even millions of acres in extent, surround those tracts with enforced barriers, and
isolate animal and plant populations into perpetuity. The intimate and intricate relationships
of adjacent ecosystems, the myriad processes in which reciprocal exchanges contribute to
sustainability – these relationships were unacknowledged in the thinking of even the most
101
Rocheblave to Carleton, July 4, 1778, in Mason, Early Chicago, pp. 416-417.
Rocheblave to Lord George Germaine, February 28, 1778, in Mason, Early Chicago, p. 407. Jack M. Sosin
describes the Illinois Country after the withdrawal of British troops as a “military vacuum.” See Sosin, The
Revolutionary Frontier, p. 117.
102
285
advanced geographers of the time. As a wolf lopes out of its territory, crossing from one
environment to another, its coat may be filled with seeds. Those seeds are shaken off, take
root and grow, and a fringe of nutrient-rich northern dropseed appears to feed both deer and
mice many leagues away. Territories and ranges are imbricated and fluid and depend on
animal – and human – movement. The encapsulated Indian buffer zone, part of the vision the
British were fighting to preserve in the American Revolution, was a chimera. In the real
world, on the banks of the Mississippi, the old French and Indian villages of Kaskaskia,
Prairie du Rocher, St. Philippe, and Cahokia hung tenuously on.
286
Epilogue
Despite the persistent narrative of the Illinois as untouched virgin land, on the eve of the
American takeover, both the Illinois Indians and the French were already living in an
environment depleted of fur-bearing animals and the kinds of trees many of those animals
depended on. In addition, introduced vegetation was thriving. On the cleared lands in the
floodplain, the French had put in significant numbers of fruit trees. Early accounts mention
apple and pear trees that “in proportion to the population were numerous.”1 While Indian
agriculture was limited to the acreage granted tribes around their villages, changes in Indian
subsistence overall affected the land in other ways. Indians had long burned sections of
prairie to create a mosaic environment attractive to specific types of game: wild turkey,
upland ruffed grouse and quail – and deer. Nut groves may have been tended on bluff tops,
and the burning of prairie vegetation insured the survival of stands of fire-resistant, sunloving oaks as well and eliminated fire-sensitive trees like red cedar and sugar maple. By
the 1790’s, Indians living in the tri-partite ecosystem of what would become the American
Bottom were no longer routinely involved with maintaining through burning. Seasonal
patterns of planting had been disturbed. Indians living in villages near old Fort Chartres and
new Fort Gage were not clearing more land, and there is little evidence of Indian agriculture
in these years. With the phasing out of autumnal burning, the invasion of woody species
from the prairie-woodland edge proceeded apace. Incoming American accounts of the
prairies mention that the native blue joint (likely big blue stem) grew to the height of a man’s
head on horseback. Accounts also describe “reeds, cane, foxtail, millet, and broom or beard
1
J.L. McDonough & Co., Combined History of Randolph, Monroe, and Perry Counties, Illinois (Philadelphia:
J.L. McDonough & Co., 1882), p. 89.
287
grass, as well as over thirty kinds of elm and some “giant” cottonwoods.”2 The land held
sloughs “hundred of miles in extent,” as well prairies which were rapidly named by white
settlers: Prairie Tamaroa, Twelve Mile Prairie, Looking Glass Prairie and Horse Prairie.3
Horse Prairie lay between the Kaskaskia River and Horse Creek. In this fertile expanse of
grassland, “herds of wild horses” grazed and multiplied, breeding from original stock that
had escaped from French settlements. These horses became prized hunting animals, for they
were capable of bursts of speed and had an “additional vigor and toughness.” One early
history states that a French pony was “a proverb for endurance.”4 Up at Cahokia a horse
trade developed in which the French were selling large numbers of horses to Indians, an
ironic inversion of the old trade patterns of the early eighteenth century.5
Eventually the burning of the thick prairie grasses was taken over by white hunters.
William Faux left a vivid account of these grasses and of their burning in southern Illinois in
1819:
...the Indian summer...is caused by millions of acres, for thousands of miles around
being in a wide-spreading, flaming, blazing, smoking fire, rising up through the
wood and prairie, hill and dale, to the tops of low shrubs and high trees, which are
kindled by the coarse, thick, long prairie grass...these fires seem to have originated
with the native tribes, and are now perpetuated by the White Hunters, who by these
means start, disturb, and pen up the game, and destroy the dens of both man and
beast, and all this with impunity.6
American hunters and settlers began to appear in the early 1780’s even before the Northwest
Territories were officially opened for land purchase. The earliest American arrivals came in
1780, a colony of settlers to the Kaskaskia area, lured by a “favorable report of the Illinois
2
Brink, McDonough and Co., History of St. Clair County (Philadelphia, 1881), p. 42.
History of St. Clair County, pp. 30-31.
4
Combined History of Randolph, Monroe, and Perry Counties, Illinois, p. 67 and 64.
5
Ibid., p. 89.
6
William Faux, cited in John White, Early Accounts of the Ecology of the Big Rivers Area (Springfield, Illinois:
Illinois Department of Natural Resources, 2000), p. 53.
3
288
Country” spread by the soldiers in George Rogers Clark’s expedition.7 In 1779, the countylieutenant of the newly-created Virginia Territory, Colonel John Todd, had issued a
proclamation forbidding “new settlements upon the flat lands of said rivers, or within one
league of said lands” (Mississippi, Ohio, Illinois, and Wabash Rivers).8 Directive had come
from the new American government that French land claims must be legally decided and the
original French farms surveyed. In issuing the injunction against settling the “flat lands of
the rivers,” Colonel Todd was acknowledging the tremendous alluvial potential of riverine
earth and perhaps as well, noting the lure of those friable lands already cleared by both
prehistoric and historic Indians and the French. When they settled along the Kaskaskia River,
these earliest Americans were clearly ignoring Todd’s proclamation. They rapidly imprinted
the land with a different set of cultural traditions, one focused on surveying, fencing, and
using even small tributary streams to send produce to market.9 Around La Belle Fontaine
spring on the uplands, settlement initially began along the old Cahokia-Kaskaskia Road, the
Chemin du Roi of the French. This settlement was called New Design, and in 1787, the first
recorded white child of English parentage was born in a log structure there.10 These upland
settlers shared in common with the remaining French a dependence on the white capot or
blanket coat; they were also typically barefoot or wore moccasins. In the absence of leather,
they made horse collars plaited from maize husks sewn together. Their cabins had ceilings
covered with pelts – raccoon, opossum, and wolf.11
7
History of Randolph, Monroe, and Perry Counties, p. 64.
“Proclamation of John Todd, June 14, 1779,” in History of Randolph, Perry, and Monroe Counties, p. 93.
9
History of St. Clair County, p. 32.
10
John W. Allen, It Happened in Southern Illinois (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University, 1968), p. 348349.
11
History of St. Clair County, pp. 56 – 59.
8
289
The mention of wolf pelts being used as cabin insulation is one of the last references to
the wolf as a useful animal, outside its role in the fur trade. Modern studies of the intricate
ecological relationships among deer, moose, wolves, and forests have indisputably
established the importance of wolf predation on large herbivores.12 In the absence of deer
herds, wolf packs will prey on livestock and possibly, on people. This pattern surfaced in the
Illinois Country in the eighteenth century and accelerated into the nineteenth. Father Gibault
making his first visit across the prairies to Vincennes wrote to Bishop Briand, “I have been
told the story of some deaths which certainly cannot be heard without drawing tears; this
portion of your flock is terribly a prey to the wolves....”13 Before the depletion of deer herds
and their own numbers through the fur trade, gray wolves (Canis lupus) sought the edge
habitats where deer ranges overlapped. Ironically, these edge habitats, the stream margins
and prairie-savanna transition zones, became the prized settlement corridors for incoming
American settlers. Research on settlement patterns in northeastern Missouri, for instance,
establishes that over and over, settlers chose the ecotonal prairie, or edge habitat, “the
preferred prairie type for early frontier agriculturists.” Such areas were transition zones that
provided access to a variety of trees for cabin and barn construction, water, pasture for stock,
small game for food, and soil that was “sparsely timbered.” Geographers call these early
settled strips of ecotonal habitat “staging areas.”14 From these transition zones, settlers made
forays out into woodlands and sent their stock to graze. While most hogs were permitted to
12
See, for instance, L. David Mech, The Wolf: The Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Species
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981); K. Kunkel and D.H. Pletscher, “Species-specific
population dynamics of cervids in a multipredator system,” Journal of Wildlife Management, Vol. 63 (4) 1999,
pp. 1082 –1093; E. Post et al, “Ecosystem consequences of wolf behavioral response to climate,” Nature, Vol.
401(6756) 1999, pp. 905 – 907.
13
See Gibault to Briand, February 15, 1769, in Alvord and Carter, Trade and Politics, p. 504.
14
Robert E. Warren and Michael J. O’Brien, “A Model of Frontier Settlement,” in Grassland, Forest, and
Historical Settlement: An Analysis of Dynamics in Northeast Missouri (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1984), p. 48.
290
range freely on the uplands in Illinois, settlers tried to protect their other animals with fences.
Yet the graceful worm fence, the sloping rail border so easily constructed by American
settlers and brought with them as part of the southern hearth culture, never kept out a hunting
wolf.
Wolf hunting and eating patterns in the wild are tied to a capacity to live a feast or famine
existence. Consummate stalkers and long-distance travelers, wolves are naturalized to find
and digest enormous amounts of meat at one time. They need to eat an average of five to ten
pounds of meat a day but may consume up to eighteen pounds. Nor are wolves usually
wasteful predators. They eat the heart, lungs, liver, and “other internal organs;” they crush
bones to extract marrow and sometimes eat hair and hooves.15 Their attacks on livestock
would not have been opportunistic but strategies for survival. Wolf hunting territories are
marked by scent and droppings, and such territories overlap and shift seasonally, what Barry
Lopez, in comparing hunting territories of Pawnee and Omaha Indians to wolf territories, has
called an “ebb and flow” of boundaries.16 While such historians as Carl Ekberg have written
movingly of the eradication of French communal agriculture under American property laws,
those same laws imposed a territorial rigidity on deer and wolf ranges equally as destructive.
The ebb and flow of natural boundaries stopped. Fencing, ditching, and timber removal
overrode sensitive animal responses to a variety of earth and climate factors, including
seasonal fluctuation in water. The loose, changing, adaptive habitat of the Illinois watery
world, characterized by natural movement of rivers, streams, animals, and Indians, entered
another phase of alteration under American rule. New species of plants, insects, fish, birds,
and even some mammals would appear even as others disappeared. Yet the means by which
15
16
Barry Holstun Lopez, Of Wolves and Men (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1978), p. 54.
Lopez, Of Wolves, p. 65.
291
these species arrived was no longer so often tied to the fluctuation of water, nor was it
gradual. The dynamic influx was tied much more directly to human real estate: who bought
and sold, which persons and how many entered the habitat.17
Under American rule, many of the entering persons were aggressive eradicators of
animals. By the early 1800’s, Randolph County Commissioner Records describe payment for
wolf bounties. On one day in session, June 5, 1804, the court accepted five wolf scalps, two
grown wolf carcasses, and seven wolf scalps again.18 Prairie du Rocher and Kaskaskia are in
Randolph County; the wolves taken there in 1804 were preying on American livestock. The
attractiveness of the cash wolf bounty, coupled with ridding the area of predators, took
precedence over the value of a wolf fur in trade. The bounty system was a direct cause of
extirpation and extinction of wolf sub-species and fueled the two hundred year old conflict
that Barry Lopez has termed “the wolf war in North America.”19 Today seven wolf subspecies are completely gone – including the Great Plains wolf and the Texas gray wolf; both
the northern and southern Rocky Mountain sub-species of wolves are extinct.20 In the areas
of old French Illinois and Missouri, the wolf war had its roots in the deerskin and fur trade.
The emptying out of the “vast” deer herds of early accounts left wolves, as predators of large
mammals, without much recourse.21 Elk were also disappearing by the time of the American
occupation. The delectable, amniotic smell of newborn calves, colts, and lambs drew
hungry wolves to early American homesteads. By 1818, Gershom Flagg, a settler in Madison
17
See similar conclusions and findings in Alan Burdick, “The Truth About Invasive Species,” Discover, Vol. 26
(5), May 2005, p. 39.
18
Randolph County, Illinois, Commissioners’ Court Records, 1802 - 1807 (published by Wanda Warkins Allers
and Eileen Lynch Gochanour, April, 1996), pp. 57 – 59. Copy at the Illinois Historical Survey.
19
Barry Holstun Lopez, Of Wolves, p. 194.
20
Barry Holstun Lopez, Of Wolves, p. 13.
21
For wolf diet and habits, see J. Knox Jones, Jr., et al, Guide to Mammals of the Plains States (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1985), p. 258.
292
County just above the French settlements, noted, “Sheep will do very well here if they can be
kept from the Wolves but this cannot well be done in the newsettled parts the wolves are so
very numerous.” Flag also mentioned that wolves were killing sows and their newborn
shoats if “the sows are not shut up til the pigs are a few weeks old.”22 While letters and
accounts from the 1780’s and 1790’s continue to mention the availability of deer and buffalo
in Illinois, these references must be carefully weighed into the total picture of imbalanced
animal populations. The 1804 Wood River Journals of Lewis and Clark, for instance,
describe the killing of deer not as members of vast herds but as one or two animals. An entry
for January 29, 1804, reads, “Shields Killed a Deer Today.” Other entries describe two deer
killed, or one deer and one turkey. Ten hunters took five deer on January 30, the largest
number recorded.23 Such entries are in contrast to the references to “roving deer herds” and
the “vast” or “immeasurable” numbers of animals, both deer and buffalo, consistently
mentioned by observers before 1770.
In the growth of wolf predation on livestock, two forces were in operation: long-disturbed
mammal populations, especially deer, and the substitution of domestic animals for those
deer. Also likely long disturbed – well before the first American settler applied for a land
title – was the Illinois Indian sense of the cosmological world as knit together in a series of
processes. Barry Lopez has described this circle of processes in his seminal work on wolves
and Native Americans, Of Wolves and Men (1978):
When, for example, the Indian left his buffalo kill, he called out to the magpies and
others to come and eat. The dead buffalo nourished the grasses, the grasses in turn
fed the elk and provided the mouse with straw for a nest; the mouse, for his part,
instructed the Indian in magic; and the Indian called on his magic to kill buffalo.24
22
Gershom Flagg, cited in John White, Early Accounts, p. 78.
The Field Notes of Captain William Clark, 1803 – 1805, cited in John White, Early Accounts, p. 51.
24
Barry Holstun Lopez, Of Wolves, p.104.
23
293
Anthropologists interviewing members of surviving Kickapoo in Oklahoma have also
documented a cosmology of “reciprocal processes.”25 Yet overlapping the Kickapoo
cosmology since the middle of the eighteenth century was a vigorous association with
Europeans and their trade world. One historian has commented that Kickapoo “old ways”
included a “strong connection with European culture.”26 The Illinois connection with the
European trade world – not to mention the influence of French Catholicism – goes back to
1699 when the Seminarians floated down the Illinois River to establish the Holy Family
Mission at Cahokia.
When George Rogers Clark entered Kaskaskia in 1778, the Illinois had lived through
nearly eighty years of close contact with Europeans and trade culture. They had adapted
their subsistence in response to rising and falling levels of game as well as climate extremes
of drought and flood. One year might bring more agriculture, then perhaps a year of longer
and farther winter and summer hunts; one year, in response to rising prices in the French fur
exchange, they might exploit the northern Mississippi watershed for small fur-bearing
mammals; another year they might hunt more buffalo.27 By the 1770’s, the French in the
Illinois were doing the same thing, refocusing trade to the south among the newly-opened
markets with Ohio River Indians. Trade also flourished to the north, out of Cahokia. In 1774
Charles Gratiot established a “grand depot for Indian trade at Cahokia.” Between 1780 and
1800, Cahokia became known as the residence of “many north-western Indian traders.” It
was also the most wholly French of all the east-bank settlements. One early account claims
25
Dillingham, “The Oklahoma Kickapoo,” cited in John Mack Faragher, Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois
Prairie (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 21.
26
Faragher, Sugar Creek, p. 23.
27
See Jeanne Kay’s discussion of the adaptations of Wisconsin Indians to changes in the fur trade, “Wisconsin
Indian Hunting Patterns,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 69 (3), September, 1979,
pp. 402—418. Kay finds that “Indian use of wildlife reflected the price of pelts, species’ fertility, and the
varying distribution of wildlife habitats.”
294
that before 1788, there were only two non-French residents in the town.28 In 1778,
exchanging furs at Michilimackinac, Charles Gratiot was able to trade for five canoe loads of
store merchandise valued at “four thousand pounds.” An inventory from his store suggests a
new, ornamental style in clothing. Gratiot carried flowered flannels, Irish linens, printed
calico, black knitted breeches, hats with piping, gold and silver lace, “silver, rose, red, black,
yellow, green, and flowered ribbands,” artificial flowers, and satin shoes.29 French traders,
Illinois Indians, other Indian nations from the north and east, Anglo-Americans, and
occasional Spanish as well as the French families living in Cahokia would have traded for
these clothing items. Other goods for sale included combs “for curling hair,” razors, and eye
glasses.30 This emphasis on gentility and decoration is markedly different from the lists of
British trade goods shipped out to Fort Chartres ten years before. The year of the Gratiot
inventory is also the year that the Illinois Country changed hands, passing to American rule.
Clearly cultural and social shifts engendered by sheer population growth were already
underway.
The story has been told of a sudden, invasive, and catalytic change through American
settlement. In the rapid influx of American settlers and in the confiscation of Indian lands
through the aggressive treaty policies of Thomas Jefferson, political and social change were
certainly intensified. The oldest extant assessment of lands in Randolph County, 1808,
indicates that 435,800 acres were “in the possession of individuals.” These enormous grants
numbered as many as 34,000, 24,800, 15,200, or 12,600 acres. The largest grant was for
130,400 acres. In comparison, the typical French grant, a 2 by 50 arpent farm, “measured out
28
History of St. Clair County, p. 45.
Letters of Charles Gratiot, cited in John Francis McDermott, editor, Old Cahokia: A Narrative and
Documents Illustrating the First Century of Its History (St. Louis: The St. Louis Historical Documents
Foundation, 1949), p. 193.
30
McDermott, p. 193.
29
295
to something like 130 acres.”31 Only small portions of the American grants were “in fields,”
and those fields are recorded as being “around Kaskaskia and Prairie du Rocher.”32 Clearly
some of these fields were the old French wheat lands, black, fertile earth that itself had
supported human beings since at least 1000 AD. The emptying out of the Illinois Country
after 1763 as well as heightened internal conflicts among tribes and between Europeans and
Indians allowed the land to begin a recovery process. Portions of prairie especially were
rebounding, with tallgrass vegetation becoming rampant; however, the gradual cessation of
burning by Indians was encouraging the growth of fire-sensitive trees and creating a weedy
understory. The look of the watery world was changing.
When the unwieldy and imprecise surveying system of metes and bounds passed into the
Jeffersonian rectilinear survey, edges of grants and property lines tightened up. Instinct in
this survey system was an expectation of control and eradication of animal and plant
populations, an expectation that at least had the merit of realism. Surveying and settlement
are intrusive processes; in the first nineteenth century histories of the area, animal and bird
populations were inventoried ruthlessly. One section of a geographical assessment was even
specifically titled, “These Birds Should Be Exterminated.” Yet the alteration in the
Mississippi floodplain environment had been ongoing at least since 1699, and the peoples
who lived the longest on that land – the Illinois Indians and the French – had endured strong
processes of disintegration and deracination. Neither the British nor the Americans ever
experienced the loss of a powerfully fecund riverine environment in which succeeding
generations of their own people had been born.
31
Taken from the U.S. GLO Survey notes between 1804 - 1810 and cited by Winstanley Briggs, “Les Pays des
Illinois,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, Vol. 47(1), January, 1990, p. 38.
32
See “Extract from the Assessment of 1808,” History of Randolph, Monroe, and Perry Counties, p. 98.
296
Bibliography
Primary Sources
H. Allyn and J. A. Meltzer, Henry Allyn, Autobiography (Portland, Oregon: Jean Allyn
Smeltzer, 1974).
Clarence W. Alvord, editor, Cahokia Records, 1778 – 1790, Virginia Series, Vol. I
(Springfield, Illinois: Illinois State Historical Library, 1907).
Clarence W. Alvord, editor, “The Illinois-Wabash Land Company Manuscript,” (Chicago:
Cyrus H. McCormick, 1915).
Clarence W. Alvord, editor, Kaskaskia Records 1778 – 1790 (Springfield, Illinois: The
Illinois State Historical Librray, 1909).
Clarence W. Alvord and Clarence Carter, Illinois Historical Collections, The Critical
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